Mind Forward | Science Documentary | Full Movie | Telepathy Technology
(bell chime) (enlightening music) [Randal] There are all kinds of situations where we would love to have more control over what the brain can do, so that you have these choices of what exactly you're taking in, what you're learning, and where you're going with that. And there are also situations where we simply wish that we could experience more. Say, for example, that you would like to be able to perceive things that we currently can't perceive, you want to be able to see the ultraviolet, or you want to be able to hear ultrasound or what if you wanted to be able to remember more things than you normally can remember? [Tan] The most exciting part of the future to me is the potential to achieve humanistic intelligence. This idea that the late Marvin Minsky talked about, which is being able to create an environment where we have a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence and we will see a blurring of our physical, digital and biological worlds, and not so much being separate parts, but as being seamless parts of one integrated human organism.
(enlightened music) [Randal] It probably will be possible to read out what's inside a person's brain, to understand what's there by translating it into something you can understand, and maybe even putting it back, giving it to someone, teaching. [Rafael] When we make a decision now, we are under the impression that we are the ones who are making the decision, and we make it because we want to make it. But if our brains are connected to the net, to the computer cloud and their algorithms that they are using are decision making, well, who is deciding? (electrical pulses) (synth music) We are curious to understand who we are, and why we think the way we think, and what is the reason of our thoughts, our memories, our imagination, our feelings... (upbeat music) Understanding this incredibly complex organ, that gives rise to everything that makes us human. Everything we see, feel, hear... our sense of identity and so given the vast complexity of the brain, in a hundred billion neurons, you know, hundreds of trillions of connections, operating in a dynamic network that's constantly changing...
It's just a really, very, very complicated system for us to study with science. So, it's a, it's a big challenge, but one that I really enjoy undertaking. [Henry] In the human brain, you have about 3 million km of fibers connecting it, so it's enough to go around the Moon a couple of times, just in one brain. [narrator] The place in the universe that is likely the most complex and mysterious, the place where emotions, thoughts and memories arise, that place in the universe that tries tirelessly to understand itself, an unsolved enigma. [Henry] We don't know and we cannot build today anything that is even as closely connected to as what we see in the human brain.
[Rafael] There's one hypothesis that suggests that what brains are doing, what our brain is doing is generating a virtual reality, a model of the world that is running in our heads all the time, this has to do with how ideas that have been floating around in philosophy for a few centuries, in particular with the suggestion by Emmanuel Kant, the German philosopher, that the reason why the world on our minds, our views of the world agree, is not because our minds reflect the world, no, no, it's the opposite, is that the world is created by our minds, in other words, that what we perceive is not out there, it's in here. It weighs less than 3 pounds. It consumes scarcely 20 or 30 watts of power, and nevertheless, it's able to make calculations more complex than a supercomputer.
There are 100 to 1000 trillion synapses, about the size of a bacteria, they basically are chemical machines. They receive an electric pulse and then they release chemicals. They hit receptors, a very complex machinery is triggered.
This results in a change in the behavior of the neurons, it causes genes to express, new proteins to come in, the cascade of biochemical and biophysical processes is enormously complex. [Katrin]If you were trying to describe a thousand networks of cells working, I would say that imagine that you are having phone calls with 10,000 people, at one at the same time, and the same what you are doing, everybody is doing, who is living on our planet, on the Earth, about 7 billion people. And when you then try to describe all this communication that is going on, of all the 7 billion people. And then you are meant to that this is only one 10th, perhaps, of the capacity, and everything is only within your skull, is restricted to one and a half kilogram, and this is complexity, in my view. [Rafael] In spite of 100 years of neuroscience, we still don't understand how the brain works, we still don't have in a general theory of the function of the brain. The first reason why I would argue is critical to understand how the brain works has to do with our own definition as human beings.
We are a mental species, we are defined by our minds, not by our bodies, so we are a very special type of animal, we don't understand the organ that generates our minds, so when we understand how the brain works, we will be able to understand how our mind is from the inside, we'll understand ourselves for the first time. The second reason has to do with the clinic, with patients. Humankind should understand how the brain works because we need, it's urgent that we help these patients that have mental and neurological diseases and we have to understand the system in order to fix it. (upbeat music) [Philippe] We estimate that possibly one person out of two to one person out of three in Europe have some kind of disorder that is related to the brain.
Altogether, it's maybe up to more than 200 million person in Europe who have one of these disorders. And it's also associated with a huge cost for the society. The cost of all disease affecting the brain more, than the cost of all cancer, plus all cardiovascular disease, plus diabetes. [Rafael] And then the third reason has to do with technology and the economy. And it is very likely that brains, not just of humans, but brains of all animals, have discovered through hundreds of millions of years of evolution ways to compute that could be much more efficient and powerful than what we're doing currently with our digital computers. So, if this is the case, if we understood, if we were able to break this neural code and understand how the brain computes and what are the algorithms that are present in our nervous systems, we will likely revolutionize computer science, computer technology, and I would say the economy at the same time.
[Tan] The Holy Grail for this will be to create a much more symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence. As we can see today, artificial intelligence is moving forward in leaps and bounds, offering us a myriad of new ways of being more productive and more efficient in how we conduct our businesses and how we manage our daily lives. With the introduction of more and more devices that actually understand the human and help humans optimize their own performance, we will have a way to create a much more a different type of intelligence, what I would call humanistic intelligence.
The distinction between the biological world, the physical world, and the digital world will just blur, and we will integrate seamlessly across all of these dimensions. [narrator] A deep understanding of the functioning of the human brain could bring answers to great philosophical questions, such as what consciousness is and how it is built, or if there is free will. Concepts such as the inner self, guilt or even reality could change forever. We are opening the door to a world where we will communicate directly with a computer through thought, a world where we will be able to share our thoughts and our emotions through the Internet.
We can envision a future in which we are able to read the thoughts of others and even to manipulate them. [Rafael] We're building technology to read the activity of all the neurons in these brains and to write activity to control and manipulate the activity of these neurons in the brain. And these technologies are necessary to be able to cure human patients. But the same technologies, technology is neutral.
It could be used for good or for bad. The same technologies to read and write activity into brains can be used to decipher what people are thinking or to influence the activity of the minds of people. So you say, well, this is science fiction? Well, not really.
[narrator] In the middle of the 90s, the last decade of the 20th century, and the second millennium, a whole revolution in the world of neuroscience occurred: the neuroimaging techniques appeared. So neuroimaging techniques are important for this revolution in how to learn and explore the brain, because it's a nice, invasive way to get inside the brain. [narrator] One of the imaging techniques that had the greatest impact was magnetic resonance imaging.
For the first time ever, we could see the inner functioning of the brain while it experiences sensations and emotions. In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging, able to detect the presence of oxygen in the blood and the brain has allowed us to discover something unimaginable years ago. How different areas in the brain interact while the patient talks, sees an image, listens to a sound, or simply thinks.
[Sandra] But if you ask him to focus on one task, like listening to a sound, only the region from this specific task, the auditory cortex, for example, will have more conception of oxygen. And this region will pop up in the contrast, if you analyze the data, even listening to sound against non listening to sound. [Rafael] The reason why we don't understand how the brain works is not because of its complexity, but because we've been lacking methods to study at the right level.
Now, if you think about it, trying to understand a system as complex as the brain that has 100 billion neurons by recording from one neuron. It's a little bit like trying to watch a movie in a TV screen that has a million pixels by looking at a single pixel. So no matter for how long you study a single pixel or you study a single neuron, you will be missing the figures in the screen and the shapes of the images. Because they are an emergent property of the correlations in space and time between the individual pixels. (electronic music) [Rafael] We think that neuroscience should embark on this period of new technology to develop the method so that neuroscientists and clinicians will be able to see for the first time in the future the activity of complete neural circuits.
And be able to decipher the functional meaning of this pattern. (ambient music) How can one measure the activity of each and every one of the neurons in the brain at the same time? The methods that we and many other people are using are optical methods. We use light because light can penetrate the tissue in a noninvasive fashion. In particular, the method that I pioneered is called Calcium imaging.
We used it for the first time to measure the activity of neural circuits. Every time a neuron fires, every time it's activated, calcium comes into the neuron. So that means if you have these little calcium indicators, these fluorescent molecules in all the neurons, you can directly see who is firing, who is being activated in the entire group at once. Because you see this as changes in fluorescent that are happening in different areas at different times. [narrator] Thanks to neuroimaging techniques, we have learned more about the brain in the last 15 years than in the whole history of humankind.
The advances already made allow us to think that in the near future, we will be able to solve neurological damage. Diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, depression or schizophrenia. Yeah, I think that the revolution we're experiencing now is first the birth and the success of human neuroscience.
We now have fields like cognitive neuroscience where we use functional brain imaging and noninvasive brain stimulation to study the functioning human brain. And that was, I think, the first step. From my perspective, I've been doing neuroscience research for 30 years and this is the revolution now. But now is the time that neuroscience is starting to reach into people's lives directly.
And to me, that's what we need to have a revolution. We need to advance from the lab into the real world. [Kim] This is a software application to be able to control the puzzle box orbit. I'll first connect it to the emotive NCIG headset, and that's now connected. What we have to do is train two patterns.
The first is a resting state so that we understand when you want to control the orbit versus not. And then the second pattern is to control what you want to apply for flying the orbit. [narrator] This leap from the lab to the real world can already be seen in the form of the perfecting of what belonged to the realm of science fiction just a few years ago: brain-computer association, the so called Brain-Machine Interfaces, have solidified this revolution in the world of the neuroscience.
[Randal] Well, BCI really just means brain computer interface. So anything that makes a connection between processing going on inside your brain and a machine, some other device. [Tej] Brain computer interfaces can be grouped as a group of technologies that can help both from a hardware and software perspective, able to both decode, process, and activate the interactions between humans and machines. Decoding the brain. Of course, typical decision would be
a platform that can help us interact from the brain to the world. [narrator] The Brain-Machine interfaces are bringing great advances in various therapeutical applications. Up to now, one of the main practical applications is the treatment of different pathologies associated with paralysis. At the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, Dr. José Millán has been working for years on an ambitious project based on the development of a brain machine interface that allows paralytics to control a robotic exoskeleton with their minds, thanks to which they can walk again or move a hand. The patients wear an electrode helmet that detects their cerebral electrical activity.
What we ask people to do at the very beginning because they need to go through a training in order to acquire the capability to modulate voluntarily their brain signals, is to imagine the movement that they want to accomplish. And this requires some time, because it is not easy to do that. Our algorithms are capable to discover which are the areas, the specific areas that they are activating and disactivating at which frequencies this is happening. And this is the input to our machine learning algorithms that will build the model of the decoder that will differentiate, opening a closing of the hand, right step, left step, and so on and so forth.
So, during this training, people at the very beginning need to imagine the movement of their own body. And in many cases, people, after some training, and because the fact that as they imagine the movement of their body, this is executed via the exoskeleton, they don't need to think any longer about their own body. They think in terms of the exoskeleton, because the exoskeleton has been integrated somehow in people's body schema that we have in our brain. (enlightening music) [narrator] The possibilities that this technique offers to these patients have allowed to a quadriplegic patient to be able to drive a Formula 1 car just with his mind. In 2017, Rodrigo Hubner Mendes became the first person to reach such a milestone. [Tan] This opportunity to work with Rodrigo was incredible.
Globo TV in Brazil created a vehicle, a Formula 1 vehicle that was completely controlled just using the power of thought. So what they used was our 14 channel epoch plus headset, measuring electrical fluctuations from Rodrigo's brain. He spent a few months mapping and training the algorithms to understand how he associated specific thoughts, whether it be drive forward, right, turn right, left, or stop. And then he was able to use those commands to drive this car completely, just using his mind.
So no steering wheel, no pedals, just him inside the vehicle. (upbeat music) [Tan] This was a very fortuitous moment when Lewis Hamilton, who is obviously the world's reigning F1 champion, was in the same place as Rodrigo in the UAE. Rodrigo posted a very exciting challenge for Lewis, which is, would you like to race me? Surprisingly, Lewis accepted the challenge, so I'm not sure when we're going to start seeing the two of them start practicing. But I know that Rodrigo is very excited about the ability and the opportunity to race with the reigning world champion, just using his mind.
[narrator] Around the world, a wide variety of projects based on brain machine interfaces are currently being developed. In Boston, the company Neuroelectrics has developed a technology based on the use of mind-controlled video games to learn to regulate brain activity. [woman] Okay, so today we are going to measure your brainwaves with this device. This device basically uses dry electrodes to measure your brain waves like this.
And today we are going to measure your specific outside brainwaves, and you're going to be able to control an object in this screen going up and down. So I'm going to put you the cap. Then we are first going to measure your baseline, which is the baseline of your brain waves, the level in which your brain is right now. So the way we have developed our brain computer interface is we are collecting brain signals, for example, alpha or beta or gamma, which are different frequencies, right? And we are capering your brain or power spectrum, your brain bands, to something in the screen, which is, in this case, a little avatar that goes up and down according to if your brain waves are up or down. So this summary here, this is going up and down according to your brain waves and you are controlling it so you need to focus on it and keep relaxed and try to control it, moving it up and down.
[narrator] The mind controlled video games are proving to be an efficient treatment for diseases like depression or hyperactivity disorder in children. At Neuroscape a neuro-technological company based in San Francisco, they are using these video games controlled by the mind for therapeutic uses. All of our research right now relies on using a closer video games that we've created so far, just using the performance, not the cognitive brain computer interface that's still very much in the research phase. And then we apply these closed loop video game treatments to see if they can improve attention abilities in many different clinical populations, including ADHD, which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but also post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, depression and autism. We developed these closed loop video games that record your performance and use that data to challenge you in a very personalized manner.
So, if it's too hard, the game could back off. If it's too easy, it can make it more challenging. It just puts it right at that sweet spot, and then the game mechanics target different neural networks that we're trying to improve.
So, it could be a prescribable treatment, just like we currently use stimulants to help improve attention abilities in children that are suffering ADHD. (enlightening music) [narrator] In the last few years, there has been a progressive blossoming of neurotech start-ups that are revolutionizing the way to intervene in our mental processes. Nowadays, most of them are focused on helping patients with different types of damage or neurological disorders. However, in the not so distant future, these companies will end up transferring all these advances to our daily lives, radically modifying the way we interact with each other and even understand the world. [Rafael] Investing in novel neurotechnology today could be the best way to generate an economic revolution in the future by the development of this new technology which instead of biotechnology in the case of the human Genome project, now it would be neurotechnology, and this is something that's starting to happen. Last year, Elon Musk created a neurotechnology company, Neuralink.
Brian Johnson, another billionaire, has created a similar company called Kernel. So, we started to have some new companies that are based on the promise that this new neurotechnologies are going to be cost and economic revolution. [Tan] Emotiv is a neuro-informatics company, so what we do is we're a platform that allows us to interface directly with the brain. Today it's using noninvasive methods. So we start from the sensor input.
So measuring the brain activity itself through to the translation of the electrical signals from the brain and then we map those to control and influence the environment around us. Look at your brain, Kim. So you're wearing a 14 channel EEG and this is just picking up electrical fluctuations that result from neurons firing inside your brain. The brain is made up of billions of neurons and when they interact, the chemical reaction just emits an electrical impulse that we can pick up. You can see that different parts of your brain is lighting up depending on what you might be thinking or whether you're paying attention to what I am saying.
So, what we're doing here is we're mapping those electrical fluctuations into a 3D model of what your brain is doing and each of the colors represent a different frequency band, which indicates how fast the information is traveling from one part of the brain to another. (inaudible) [narrator] Located in Lasanne, Switzerland, in the center of Europe, is the headquarters of Mind Maze, one of the largest neurotechnological companies in the world. [Taj] And our big goals are really to disrupt industries from healthcare, so really improving quality of life after a neurological injury all the way to being able to help healthy individuals enable the ability of the brain to learn, to play, to interact, entertain. [narrator] One of those technologies designed to help the rehabilitation of patients who have suffered stroke is MindMotion Pro. [Taj] It's the first device a stroke or a brain injury patient sees after the injury, the first two days when they come out and they need to recover. It's one of the first devices that's able to start training of both the brain and the body.
So it's about neuroplasticity tricking the brain. [woman] So we're going to put markers on you so that the camera can see your arms while we do some activity. So it's pretty intuitive. You'll just need to move your hand to the start button. And similarly, if you move it in the direction that isn't indicated, you'll see how to correct it. [Taj] So let's say someone who has a stroke cannot move the left hand and he can move the right hand.
The camera in the Mind Motion Pro tracks the right hand and puts it on an avatar on the left side, and then the brain suddenly says, Something's happening there, so I should try more, it starts activating the pathways that used to control that hand and slowly accelerates recovery. [narrator] The latest and most ambitious proposal of MindMaze, the cognichip, goes one step further and merges neuro-technology with artificial intelligence. Some entrepreneurs are looking into augmenting our brains so that we can develop super intelligence that allows us to collaborate with artificial intelligence.
It would be a way to reduce the risk for human beings to become irrelevant due to the rise of artificial intelligence. It is the next frontier. [Taj] Neuroscience and neurotechnology, brain technology is definitely the next frontier.
Now we truly are at the frontier where we can do some impactful things with the brain. So, yeah, neurotechnology is now really going to kick off. [footage] Ignition sequence, start 654-3210 All engines running.
[narrator] One of the greatest technological and scientific milestones in history was the arrival of man on the moon. The Kennedy era was one of the periods of the greatest scientific splendor the world has ever known. As a consequence, an important economy grew around it, which led in a very short time to unprecedented technological development. [President Obama] Ideas are what power our economy.
We do innovation better than anybody else. And that makes our economy stronger. [Chris] We had had many interactions with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and they had explained to us that they were interested in grand challenges for the US government to pursue any different areas of science that they thought could really be of the same ilk as, for instance, the Apollo moon landings, a big project that really would allow the entire US community to get behind something that would make a huge impact in science. [narrator] They found that great science project in the Brain Initiative, a research mega project that Obama announced in 2013 with the goal of unveiling the mysteries of the brain.
(inaudible) [Rafael] It's a very exciting moment. There are many groups around the world developing new methods, and this is now leading to a re-energizing of neuroscience and to the perception that we can really do it, that this is doable, that we can actually end up being able to record the activity of every nerve in a brain and decipher it, and this could really revolutionize neuroscience, just like the human Genome project revolutionized genetics. [narrator] Very soon after the launching of the BRAIN Initiative, the European Union announced its own mega project, the Human Brain Project. [Rafael] It turns out that similar initiatives have been created in different countries. So there's brain initiative in Japan, in Canada, in China, in Australia, South Korea and Israel. [narrator] The development of all these projects could change the scenario of brain research and lead humanity to unprecedented advances.
[Rafael] So this is very exciting, this is just happening. And I hope that this will provide the ability to generate knowledge and send this knowledge throughout the world into different countries in a way in which no one is left behind. And we're all part of the same exciting moment in history. (upbeat music) [narrator] We've started the path to a new world in which a deeper knowledge of the brain will radically transform our human condition. (warp sound) (upbeat music) (digital data sounds) [narrator] Brain-machine communication will grow progressively more efficient and precise and will open up a vast range of possibilities for human beings to benefit from the potential offered to us by artificial intelligence.
(electronic music) [Tan] With the introduction of more and more devices, that actually understand the human and help humans optimize their own performance, we will have a way to create a much more a different type of intelligence, what I would call humanistic intelligence. The idea is that you can create a myriad of devices and sensors around us that interface and interplay with artificial intelligence in a way that makes humans much more symbiotic with their environment. So the distinction between the biological world, the physical world, and the digital world will just blur, and we will integrate seamlessly across all of these dimensions. So when you feel confused, your AI will recognize that and will prompt you with commands. If it recognized that you're fatigued it'll, send a command to bruise a coffee pot or a message to your phone reminding you to go out and take a short walk and stretch your legs. So you will become integrated with your environment, and your environment becomes an extension of your brain.
And I think that type of humanistic intelligence is really where we're going to see the future go. (digital data sounds) (serene music) (chime) (inaudible) [narrator] The cognitive capacities of human beings will be enhanced. [Giulio] There are experiments by colleagues such as Roy Cohen Kadosh that have shown that you can improve numerical abilities in children that have dyscalculia, people who have difficulty in doing arithmetic and so on.
I think enhancement via implants and things like this is definitely gonna be possible. [Rafael] Technologies are going to enable humans to augment ourselves mentally, just like holding an iPhone, we can have access to enormous amount of information if that comes directly piped into our brains, we're going to be able to operate at the cognitive level above what we operate at normally. So they're going to be augmented humans.
So, this could cause major difference in the society, can accentuate the difference between different social groups, different countries. And we have to ensure that there's equal access to all of that, that there's a principle of furnace that runs across the application of these new new technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms. [Randal] It gets more interesting when you can think about neuroprosthesis in the cognitive parts of the brain. So let's take, for instance, this hypocampo prosthesis. The patients who are going to be the first ones to use these devices are going to be the first people with some kind of superhuman memory ability. The very first type of memory ability is going to be that they can choose when they do remember something and when they don't, because they can say, okay, the experiences that were coming through at 03:00 yesterday, I want those to be enhanced.
(inaudible) (electronic music) (classical music) [narrator] Brain-Computer communication will make way for brain computer brain interfaces. [Randal] You take what this person has learned, you run it through the translator and you give it to someone else's brain. Or you just want to be able to communicate through something like telepathy. You can read out what a person is trying to say or what they're imaging, what they're imagining. And you can try to give those imaginings or those sounds to someone else. But you could try to detect what a person is feeling.
And you can translate that in a way and then give it to someone else. So you can imagine this as a communication pathway that wouldn't just work for words, but it would work for images, it would work for feelings. It would work for anything that we share, in a sense, where we can say because we're all humans, we all have feelings of happiness and of sadness and of pain, and we have a smell and we have vision.
So you can transfer smells, you can transfer vision, you can transfer auditory, you can eventually, with enough translation, even translate knowledge and memory. [Guilio] Connecting brains is going to be done, there are definitely hurdles and it's going to take very important technological breakthroughs. I think in the future we will definitely have very powerful synthetic telepathy technologies. (warping sound) [narrator] It will be possible not only to read others thoughts, but also to manipulate them. [Rafael] Let's think about it a little bit more about the impact and repercussions of this new knowledge to society, to humanity. [Rafael] We can, using mice, we cannot read activity of every neuron here in the brain of a mouse, but if you look at the visual cortex, you can actually read the activity of a few thousand neurons there.
And we can decipher some of the patterns of activity as they relate to what the animal is seeing, what the animal is looking at. And then we can go in with optical methods, with optogenetics, and selectively change the patterns of activity and fool the animal into thinking that he's saying one thing or the other thing by essentially playing the piano with this neural circuits in the visual cortex of the brain. This is something we can do today, people could do this with humans, not today. We don't have the methods to control, to read the activity of many neurons in the brain of humans and to change that.
But these methods are going to be developed because we need them for the patients. In fact, there's a project supported by DARPA, by the foundation of Military Research to build an electronic chip to record the activity of 1 million neurons in a human, in a human patient and to stimulate 1000 neurons at the same time. And this is not science fiction. This is something that's being built as we speak.
In fact, we're helping to build them because they need to use this for patients. And this could be in the clinic in four years. (upbeat music) [narrator] A whole new world of opportunities is opening up before our eyes.
A world where we will have the ability to coevolve with artificial intelligence. There is even a hypothesis that in the distant future we won't need our biological structures. If all we are are our thoughts, our memories, our emotions, our whole self can be transferred into a computer. Our biological bodies will no longer be necessary. [Randal] So now we're getting into the more far future science fiction aspect of this whole endeavor.
There's a science fiction term called mind uploading. What it means is that mind or who we are, is they no longer dependent on the biological brain as such, you still need a brain, there's no such thing as no device running your mind. But it could be all sorts of devices.
It could be a device that is better suited for, say, for example, living in space or living on another planet or living underwater or something like that. So when you get to a far future where the technology of whole brain emulation, which is really the more scientific concept, what is it you're actually doing here? You're trying to emulate what's going on in the circuitry when you have that, then you can start thinking about the personal and social consequences of doing that, which is really what mind uploading means. It's a very philosophical term in a sense. Like what happens if you can take who I am, my mind and move me to something else.
So many things are then potentially possible. You could make backups of your mind so that if something happens, you can restore and it's not as devastating. (warping sound) (synth music) [narrator] The knowledge we have acquired in recent years about the brain has given us possibilities until recently considered science fiction. We're advancing at very high speed.
We can't know where a deeper knowledge of the brain will lead us, but it's in our hands to steer it in the right direction. [Rafael] It's critical to have guidelines, ethical guidelines, for the development of these technologies. We propose to add to the human Universal Declaration of Human Rights, new rights to protect individuals from the abuse of neurotechnologies and artificial intelligence. So this is what we call the neurorights, and they have to do with protecting the mental Privacy of people. So this is our first one. Not just the data Privacy of our phone, no, the mental Privacy, our thoughts, and even worse, our subconscious thoughts, things that we don't even know, we're not aware of knowing them.
Those should be protected, this is the ultimate human right, our mental privacy. We should also have protection as we connect ourselves to computers through brain computer interfaces. Look at the effect that connecting us to the Net through our iPhones has had in our culture.
Well, imagine if that connection could be direct through some brain computer interface that could be maybe wireless and non-invasive, that could happen in the future. So, this is going to affect our sense of identity, of who we are, we need to protect the sense of identity, the I, the self. This is something that humans never had to worry about in the past, no one ever had that problem before.
[Rafael] Related to this is also our sense of agency or free will. It could be someone who wants to actually change the way you're operating. So that's another fundamental right that has to be protected. So, these are the neurorights.
Now we have to convince the leaders of the world, the leaders of the society, that this is a very important issue. We're discussing the future of our society, the future of humankind, and that we have to make sure that these technologies, which are so powerful and they could cause so much good, not just in patients, but among ourselves, we'd be able to finally understand who we are. It's like a new Renaissance that these technologies are not used against us. We have to be vigilant, and we just have to put this ethical framework in place so that this doesn't happen. [Randal] This understanding is just going to give us the tools to develop in many different directions, to explore in many directions, and also to be versatile and adaptable so that maybe the human species has a really long term future, not the kind of future where it works for a while, and then we're not adapted well enough, and that's it. But a really long term future.
That's what I'm hoping that this could ultimately lead to. I hope it could provide us with the tools to have basically what you might call another Cambrian explosion, where the new species develop in all kinds of directions, except it's us. It's the human species deciding that we want to try out this direction, try out that direction, and so forth.
[Rafael] Science can change the world. It can change society. It can change the course of history, and I can do that for good or for bad. It's up to us to make sure that it goes in the right direction. [narrator] We've entered a new age, the age of neuroscience.
An age in which the way we experience and feel the world will radically change. Welcome to the world of tomorrow. (crash) (electronic music)
2025-03-18 18:12
