One involved a dinosaur jumping over a series of obstacles. “It's, how do we ourselves become more capable?” I strapped the device to my arm and played some games. The demo was designed to show off the company’s vision: “The question at CTRL-Labs is not, how do we make our devices more capable?” as cofounder Thomas Reardon told an audience at Slush in 2018. Facebook acquired the company for close to $1 billion in September.Ī few months earlier, I had a chance to try out CTRL-Labs’ device myself. It also uses dry electrodes, but this device is an armband and captures signals from nerves. Another startup, CTRL-Labs, released a developer kit last year for a similar noninvasive neural interface. NextMind isn’t the only company trying to develop, for the masses, noninvasive BCIs. It’s hard to say why you’d need to do these things with your mind, but when you do, you really feel like a Jedi. I changed the colors on a set of smart lightbulbs that Kouider had set up for me. I cracked a digital vault by concentrating on the right numbers on a pincode. ![]() I changed the channel on a mock TV set by glancing at one corner of the screen. This little magic trick was repeated through a series of demos. ![]() I focused my gaze on the ducks and, in less than a second, they exploded. For that, devices like NextMind’s do the trick. And for all the promise of BCIs, people first need to see that this stuff can be useful at all. On the other hand, it’s cheaper, it’s safer, and it’s much easier to iterate or push software updates when you don’t need to open someone’s head. Going the nonsurgical route comes with some trade-offs, namely all that skin and bone between your soggy brain and any device that’s trying to read the neural signals it emits. ![]() “This is real,” he said onstage at Slush, “and the possibilities are endless.” Kouider’s vision begins with simple tasks (sending text messages with a thought calling up a specific photo in your camera roll with passing thoughts) and ends somewhere close to science fiction (controlling every device in our world, like the sorcerer in Fantasia). ![]() His startup, NextMind, makes a noninvasive neural interface that sits on the back of one’s head and translates brain waves into data that can be used to control compatible software. In the meantime, a wave of companies is betting on bringing Mind Control Lite to the masses with a neural interface that requires no surgery at all. The mysteries of the mind remain vast, and implanting hardware in healthy brains-well, forget about that, at least until the FDA deems it safe (light-years away). Of course, that won’t happen anytime soon. Even so, the likes of Musk already envision a future where we’ll all have chips in our brains, and they’ll replace our need for keyboards, mouses, touchscreens, joysticks, steering wheels, and more. But they are still surgically implanted, and still quite experimental. Today, BCIs can regulate tremors from Parkinson’s disease and restore some basic movement in people with paralysis. The quest to meld mind and machine dates back to at least the 1970s, when scientists began, in earnest, to drill into peoples’ skulls and implant the first brain-computer interfaces-electrodes that translate brain cell activity into data. No, he was merely joining the long line of entrepreneurs (see: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg) who believe that we will one day manage our machines with our thoughts. When Sid Kouider showed up at Slush, the annual startup showcase in Helsinki, wearing an ascot cap and a device he claimed would usher in a new era of technological mind control, no one thought he was crazy.
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