Mind Mass Control — No implant required

WHEN SID KOUIDER appeared at Slush, Helsinki 's annual start-up showcase, wearing an ascot cap and a gadget he said would lead into a new age of technical mind control, nobody thought he was nuts. No, he's just entered the long line of entrepreneurs (see: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg) who think we'll control our computers with our thoughts one day.

The quest to combine mind and machine dates back to at least the 1970s, when scientists started drilling into peoples' skulls and implanting the first computer-brain interfaces—electrodes that translate brain cell activity into data.

Today, BCIs can control Parkinson's disease tremors and regain some basic movement in paralyzed people. But they're all surgically implanted, but very experimental. Even so, Musk's likes already imagine a future where we'll all have chips in our brains, replacing our need for keyboards, mouses, touchscreens, joysticks, steering wheels, and more.

That won't happen anytime soon. Mind mysteries remain enormous, and implanting hardware into healthy brains — well, forget that, at least until the FDA considers it safe (light-years away). Meanwhile, a wave of companies bet on bringing Mind Control Lite to the masses with a neural interface that requires no surgery.

That's when Kouider arrives. His startup, NextMind, creates a non-invasive neural interface that sits on one's back and transforms brain waves into data for tracking compatible devices.

Kouider 's dream starts with simple tasks (sending text messages with a thought; calling up a particular picture in your camera roll with passing thoughts) and finishes somewhere near science fiction (controlling every tool in our universe, like Fantasia's sorcerer). "It's true," he said at Slush, "and the possibilities are endless."

Going the non-chirurgical route comes with some trade-offs, namely all that skin and bone between your soggy brain and any device trying to read the neural signals it sends.

In the other hand, it's cheaper, it's healthier, and iterating or pushing software updates much easier when you don't need to open someone's mouth. And for BCI 's pledge, people must first see that this stuff can be useful at all. Tools like NextMind do the trick.

I had a chance to check the NextMind system in December, a few weeks after Kouider gave his Slush chat. He flew from Paris to San Francisco and held the tool casually in his luggage. It weighs around 60 grams like a kiwi fruit, and bears a slight resemblance to flattened TIE warrior.

NextMind is essentially a dressed-up electroencephalogram, or EEG, used to monitor electrical activity in the brain. It's not that different from the methods Kouider used as neuroscience professor before he ran NextMind. His Paris lab specialized in consciousness studies.

EEGs still need gel and some skin preparation in hospital settings, but recently researchers have established usable dry electrodes that only involve skull touch. The NextMind tool uses these along with a proprietary substance that Kouider says is "extremely sensitive to electrical signals." (He wouldn't tell me exactly what the substance is.)

Kouider put the device on my head; it comes with tiny comb-like teeth that brush through hair to keep the device right on the back of the skull. (Kouider, who's bald, wears a clipped hat back.)

There, the device's electrodes are well placed to monitor visual cortex activity, a tiny region in the brain's back. This then converts the signals into digital data , processes them on the computer, uses a machine-learning algorithm to decode them, and converts them into commands.

Kouider led me through a testing exercise on a laptop to build my "neural profile"—in effect, how my visual cortex lit up to my eyes concentrating on different items.

(I followed a sequence of blinking triangles across the screen; you only have to do this once, and only for a few minutes.) The NextMind tool is intended to operate on everyone, but it works better when somebody's been training. Kouider says it's a neural feedback loop: Ah, when I concentrate on that, it's on the phone.

Generated neural profile, I was able to play games. NextMind launches its CES developer kit in January. The company designed a few prototypes to demonstrate what its software can do to court developers.

I tried one on Nintendo's Duck Hunt, which Kouider played as a child. Kouider leaned as ducks danced across the screen. "Try aiming," he whispered, "with your eyes."

I focused my attention on the ducks and erupted within a second. A set of demonstrations repeated this little magic trick. I changed the channel on a mock TV set by watching a screen corner.

I unlocked a digital vault by pincoding the right numbers. I adjusted the colors on Kouider 's package of smart lightbulbs. It's hard to say why you'd have to do these things with your mind, but when you do, you feel like a Jedi.

NextMind isn't the first organization to build non-invasive BCIs for the public. Another company, CTRL-Labs, launched a developer kit for a similar non-invasive interface last year. It also uses dry electrodes, but it's a cuff and catches nerve signals. Facebook purchased the company in September for nearly $1bn.

I had a chance to try CTRL-Labs' system myself a few months ago. The demo was planned to demonstrate the company's vision: "The CTRL-Labs question is not, how can we make our devices more capable? "As co-founder Thomas Reardon told Slush in 2018.

"It's how we are more competent ourselves? I put my arm's monitor and played games. One involved a dinosaur running over hurdles. With just a twitch of my finger, the dinosaur jumped. At one point, Patrick Kaifosh (then CTRL-Labs' CTO, now research manager for Facebook Reality Labs) entered the credentials to open his laptop by staring at it.

Named neuroauthentication.

The system, like most BCI research, uses the motor cortex, the brain component the controls movement. Reardon 's breakthrough was in singling out the spinal cord 's neurons that transmit electrical signals to the arm and hands, rather than going to the brain region itself.

Much of BCI's clinical work often includes the motor cortex, partly because too much study has concentrated on movement disorders: Parkinson's, paralysis, etc. Yet Kouider suggests the visual cortex provides a richer range of neural signals for people seeking to monitor their computers. Once I asked him why so much research was done in the motor cortex, he hesitated and then said, "I think that's because they make a mistake."

Since the NextMind app uses sight-related signals, it may feel like gussy-up eye-tracking. So what if your eyes change the channel? People have done it for years. (After the demo, Kouider said his BCI could function even if I closed my eyes.) Right now, you 're gazing at things.

Eventually, Kouider claims, the system will tap into our imagination, transforming visual thoughts into actions.

But the issue with some of these BCI devices isn't that they can get fast enough to improve gameplay or power smart-home systems. It's if anyone cares. InteraXon, a Canadian company, used to develop a head-worn system that could monitor lights with thought power but ultimately gave up.

"Frankly, you could transform the thing much easier with your side," said Scientific American's co-founder, Ariel Garten. Although accessibility use cases will emerge for this technology, InteraXon pivoted to make Muse a meditation headband.

Kouider is pitching the idea that NextMind 's app and other non-invasive neural interfaces of its ilk would be like the keyboard, or the computer mouse:

Anything that communicates with our personal technology. But at this early stage, BCI is more like the headset of virtual-reality than the Next Great Interface: mind-blowing in their demos, but easy to put in the box.