Not sure if it will occur in the next five decades, but brain enhancement is our future. In a New York Q&A, neuroscientist Heather Berlin tells Adam K. Raymond about the path forward. Everything she says seems plausible except for the potential controlling or curtailing of neural prosthetics because some will initially have unequal access to it. That I doubt. The opening:

Question:

What surprising things will we be able to do with our brains in the next 50 years?

Heather Berlin:

I think we will start to incorporate neural prosthetics. For example, electrical implants can stimulate parts of the brain to treat psychiatric illness. I think in the future we will start using these implants for cognitive enhancement — to help increase our memory or to increase our attention. Or to make us not need as much sleep and stay alert longer.

If people have neural implants, it will be possible for them to control a cursor on a computer or type emails just by using their thoughts. I also think we’ll be able to decode people’s thoughts at some level and predict what they might be thinking, maybe not with 100 percent accuracy, but maybe 70 or 80 percent.

Question:

How would that work?

Heather Berlin:

With an implant that records information. For example, there are studies where they’ll show someone a picture while they’re in an fMRI machine. We can show a person, say, a picture of a fish and a cat, and we can record what their brain activity looks like. Then we can show them a picture and without knowing the picture, look at the brain activity and predict what the person is seeing, whether it’s a fish or a cat.

That’s what we have already. Fifty years in the future we’ll get better at decoding this information. We’ll be able to predict what a person is seeing based on this brain activity or maybe even what they’re thinking.

Question:

And you think this stuff will be elective, the kind of thing people do for fun?

Heather Berlin:

The kind of stuff we’re using now to treat psychiatric illness will eventually be used for cognitive enhancement. Like the way we have plastic surgery to get a better nose or breast implants, you’ll be able to get these neural implants that will increase cognitive function. Maybe only people who can afford it get neural implants, and they have an advantage. Maybe it’s going to be like performance-enhancing drugs, where it’s going to have to be controlled.•