How diseases, thoughts and dreams are searched for in the brain

It’s a special birthday: it’s been 100 years since the electrical activity in the human brain was first measured using electroencephalography (EEG). This discovery was revolutionary. It’s helped us understand a lot about how our brains work and about diseases: for example, epilepsy is a neurological disorder, not a personality trait.

The basics of the EEG method haven’t changed since then. Scientists and doctors still put electrodes on people’s heads to see what’s going on in their brains. But now we can get a lot more out of the information we collect.

The multi-instrument EEG also shows us how we remember.

With the help of EEG, we have learned more about how we think, remember, and solve problems. EEG has also been used to diagnose brain and hearing disorders, to check a person’s level of consciousness, and even to control devices such as computers, wheelchairs, and drones. The anniversary is a good time to think about the future of this technology. What will EEGs enable us to do in 100 years?

To answer this question, it is first necessary to clarify what an electroencephalogram (EEG) is and how it works. For EEG measurements, electrodes are placed on a person’s head, which collect electrical signals from brain waves and send them to a computer for analysis. Today’s devices often look like swimming caps. Compared to other brain imaging technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners, they are very cheap, small, and fairly portable.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) was originally developed to measure “psychic energy.”

The German psychiatrist Hans Berger was the first to use an EEG on humans. Berger was fascinated by the idea of ​​telepathy and developed the EEG to measure “psychic energy.” He conducted much of his early research on his teenage son in secret, says Faisal Mushtaq, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Leeds in Britain. Because of his unclear connections to the Nazi regime, Berger was and remains a controversial figure.

But EEG has revolutionized the world of neuroscience. It has become an integral part of neuroscience labs, and can be used on people of all ages, even newborns. Neuroscientists use EEGs to study how babies learn and think, and even what makes them laugh. EEGs have even been used in… lucid dreaming phenomenon To understand, How are our memories stored during sleep?and to enable people to do so Turn on the TV with just your thoughts.

Electroencephalography (EEG) can also serve as a gateway into the minds of people who are unable to communicate. It has been used to Signs of awareness People in a vegetative state, also known as unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and formerly called a “vegetative state,” have also been able to communicate through thoughts and ideas. To let their family members know they are happy..

What achievements will EEG achieve?

What happens next? Mushtaq and Pedro Valdes Sosa of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and colleagues posed this question to 500 people working in EEG, including neuroscientists, clinical neurophysiologists, and brain surgeons. Using ChatGPT, the team generated a list of predictions ranging from highly probable to somewhat fanciful. Each of the 500 survey participants was asked to estimate when each prediction might come true.

Some of the fastest advances are coming in sleep analysis, participants say. Electroencephalograms (EEGs) are already used to diagnose and monitor sleep disorders. They should become routine in the next decade.

Consumer EEG is also likely to become more widespread in the near future, giving many of us the opportunity to learn more about our brain activity and how it relates to our well-being. “It might be integrated into some sort of baseball cap that you wear while walking and that connects to your smartphone,” says Mushtaq. These EEG caps were It has already been tested on workers in China. It is used to monitor fatigue in truck drivers and miners.

Until now, the use of EEG has focused on the laboratory and hospital settings.

So far, EEG communication has been limited to the lab or hospital, with studies focused on the technology’s potential to help people with paralysis or impaired consciousness. However, that is likely to change in the coming years as more clinical trials are completed. Participants believe that EEG could become a primary means of communication for these people in the next 20 years.

At the other end of the scale is what Mushtaq calls a more “fanciful” application—the idea of ​​using EEGs to read people’s thoughts, memories, and even dreams. Mushtaq thinks this is a “relatively crazy” and far-fetched proposition, especially since we don’t yet have a clear picture of how and where our memories are formed. But this isn’t pure science fiction, and some participants predict that the technology could become a reality in about 60 years.

Artificial intelligence is likely to help neuroscientists extract more information from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings by uncovering hidden patterns in brain activity. It is already being used to… to convert a person's thoughts into written wordsalbeit with limited accuracy. “We are on the cusp of an AI revolution,” says Mushtaq.

Protecting our ideas is required?

This kind of advance will raise questions about our right to intellectual privacy and how we can protect our thoughts. According to Nita Farahany, a futurist and legal ethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, brain data itself isn’t thought, but it can still be used to draw conclusions about a person’s thoughts or feelings. “The only person who has access to your brain data right now is you, and it’s only analyzed in the internal software of your brain,” she says. “But once you put a device on your head, that data is immediately transmitted to the device manufacturer and to the platform provider.

Valdes-Sosa is more optimistic about the future of EEG. He says the technology’s low cost, portability, and ease of use make it a prime candidate for use in poor countries with limited resources. He has been using it in his research since 1969. He says EEG should be used to monitor and improve brain health around the world: “It’s difficult… but I think it could happen in the future.”

This article is by Jessica Hamzelow. She is a senior correspondent at the US edition of MIT Technology Review and writes about biomedicine and biotechnology.