Decoding: brainwaves

The downtown is bustling. It's a cityscape, skyscrapers in every direction. You're striding carefree on a busy sidewalk. Everything is a bit blurry: the concrete, the faces, the sounds of cars. You take a look at your watch, and for no particular reason, it doesn’t quite make sense. Worried now, you walk faster, and your gaze traces the surroundings more closely. You let out a sigh of relief -- it isn't real, none of it is.
With recent advances in brain technology you may soon be able to buy devices that let you become aware in your dreams. This blog post discusses this and other fascinating advancements in the neuro-technology pipeline and how I am hoping to be part of it. 

​What are these devices?

So, there are devices that can read your “brainwaves”... But what does that actually mean?

​Well, when your brain wants to do something (e.g. move your hand, or count to ten), it requires communication between a large number of brain cells (like, a lot). This communication is done through small electric pulses, which add together to form measurable voltages, like a tiny short-lived battery. Now, before you run away kicking and screaming because this sounds like a highschool science class, bare with me for just a moment more. This electric activity can be detected without any discomfort or side effects simply by placing a cover with metal sensors onto your head. This is called electroencephalography or EEG for short. 

Normally, EEG requires a lab with hospital-grade equipment, like the image on the left with wires, but over the last several years, inexpensive ($300) portable versions have been introduced, like the headband on the right. This has opened the door for innovation to bring brain devices into everyday life. 
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What are they for?

Right now, they are predominantly used for something called neurofeedback: measuring your brain activity and informing you to help guide your mind into whatever state you want (focus, meditation, relaxation etc.). 

In my research, I am trying to use the same $300 devices that are used for meditation, but repurposing them to detect brain tumours. Tumours, especially in the brain, are hard to detect early because it’s expensive to find, and they’re (thankfully) very rare. The result is that people who are diagnosed with them are often fighting very aggressive cancers. 

My vision for the future of this research is that each person’s brain activity could be tracked over time similar to how blood work is done. If some component of the brain activity begins to deviate from their usual recordings, we can use an AI to alert us that there is an anomaly, similar to how credit card companies detect fraud. The patient could then be brought in for further testing to determine if there is a problem, like a tumour. [shameless plug: if you want to be a control for this study, I will gladly enrol you!]

What is the future?

Besides just medicine though, one active form of research is to translate your brainwaves into an image of what you are visualizing. One group has made an AI model, known as Dream Diffusion, that can do this quite well. Here’s an example from their paper: the left column is a real photo the user is looking at, and the other three columns predictions made by an AI that translates their brainwaves to images. 

Beyond just brain wearables, incredible things are happening in AI more broadly. Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently revealed the next big thing they call Sora – an AI that can generate short videos that look like actual hollywood-level productions (https://openai.com/sora). 

Imagine combining these technologies so that your brainwaves could be rendered into a short film. If this was implemented in a virtual reality headset, it could act as a projector building a 3D virtual world as you imagine it. 

While it’s fascinating to see thoughts projected onto a screen, there is a group who is going one step farther. A startup team known as Prophetic AI has developed a device that will be able to alter your brain activity to give you control over your dreams. This is possible, because their device “The Halo” can simultaneously read and alter brain activity by emitting small vibrations like an ultrasound that can activate your brain. It will wake your brain up, just enough, that you become conscious in your dreams, sometimes referred to as “lucid dreaming”. While this may sound ridiculous, the beta version of the product is supposedly ready. I recently got the news that I have been selected from thousands of applications as one of 50 people who get to try it this summer! I’m stoked to be going to NYC to meet the team at their office and see for myself whether the device works.
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To feed into my own excitement for this invitation, I just re-watched the film Inception, by Christopher Nolan. My imagination ran wild with parallels, envisioning how users of such a device could become dreaming experts, like the dream “architects” in the film. The architects bend reality like a god, folding a landscape on itself like closing a quesadilla (image on the right). If the device does in fact unlock this type of power, I can only imagine the creative adventures and experiences it will create. 

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Imagine if doctors could track your mental health or if a device could let you re-live your favourite memories. With all these futuristic advances, I think there’s a lot of untapped potential, both in the biomedical and consumer spaces. By the end of my PhD project, I am hoping that I will be well-positioned to catch this wave of neurotech, and participating in building the future! Stay tuned for updates about The Halo...