Should You Upgrade Your Brain?

Mind-machine interfaces have the potential to upgrade our intelligence and supercharge our thinking. But at what cost?

- Lucy Maddox

Would you have an IQ-boosting microchip implanted in your brain if you had the chance? What if everyone else around you did? Imagine your work colleagues outperforming you, and your friends having conversations you can’t quite follow. Would you upgrade your brain then? Should you?

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not such an outlandish idea. Earlier this year, an announcement from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s company Neuralink caught the attention of the world’s media. A range of different ways to link brain signals and computers – brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs – already exist, but Neuralink has improved this technology using impressively small, super-thin, flexible microelectrodes, which enable a tiny device to be implanted in the brain to read (and potentially write) neural signals. They have trialled this in monkeys, and seek to trial it in humans.

So far, research has focused on the many possible medical applications for BCIs, but Neuralink also wants to create a device that can be used by healthy people for brain improvement. Cognitive enhancement could be the future Botox. But although a tuned-up brain could expand human possibilities, some experts are already cautioning of the dangers that may lie ahead.

Brain enhancement of healthy individuals is not yet possible, but Dr Davide Valeriani is one expert who thinks that it could become an option within his lifetime.

“All big companies are interested in jumping into brain-computer interfaces,” explains Valeriani, a postdoctoral researcher in BCIs at Harvard Medical School in the US. He lists Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, as well as agencies such as the US military. “If big companies work on this then we can push the research. They have more resources.”

Mind machines