Thinking Makes It Go

   With the precision of a violin maker, Dr. Edward Chang pulls a row of staples from the mostly shaved scalp of Annette Graves, a 30-year-old epilepsy patient. She is lying, anesthetized, on a table in Operating Room 9 on the fourth floor of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center. Her head peeks out from a mound of blue sheets, and the remainder of her blond hair, entangled with wires, drapes over the table. Chang peels back Graves’ scalp and eases off an iPod-size piece of skull, revealing six transparent plastic sheets, dotted with electrodes, that lie across the top of her gently pulsing brain.
     Ten days previously, the 36-year-old surgeon, a leader in cutting-edge brain research, had installed the electrodes on the surface of Graves’ cortex, with the goal of recording the electrical firings of her brain cells and pinpointing the part of her brain that’s causing seizures. Three hours later, the operation has come a long way. Chang carefully slices and vacuums tissue in Graves’ brain, working just a fraction of an inch from her brain stem. Were he to slip, or cut a little too deep, Graves could be paralyzed—or worse. Chang’s hands are steady, though, as he pries Graves’ right hippocampus free and snips it from her brain. (Everyone has a pair of hippocampi. When one is removed, the other can usually do the jobs—memory processing and spatial navigation—of both.) Chang may perform brain surgery several times a week, he says, but he never loses his sense of the privilege of working inside a place so sacred.
     This time it is particularly inspiring, since Graves has bravely volunteered to be a guinea pig in Chang’s groundbreaking research program, conducted with his colleagues at UCSF and UC Berkeley’s Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses (CNEP). The center, which was founded two years ago, largely over discussions at Saul’s Restaurant and Delicatessen in Berkeley, now unites 19 of the Bay Area’s top neuroscientists, computer scientists, and electrical engineers. Chang, who grew up in Palo Alto and is one of CNEP’s two codirectors, combines many of the talents of all three. “Eddie’s a triple threat,” says Mitchel Berger, chairman of neurological surgery at UCSF. “He’s a gifted surgeon accomplished way beyond his years— but what makes him so unusual is his innovative thought processes as a researcher; he’s always thinking way ahead of the curve.”
     One thing he’s thinking about is how to marry brains and computers to help disabled people function better. If he and his colleagues succeed, spinal cord–injury patients will be able to control prosthetic limbs, operate computers, and speak through synthesizers using their thoughts alone. (The electrodes in Graves’ brain have contributed to the study of the speech part of that equation.) Millions more, those who have suffered brain traumas or been left paralyzed by strokes, could be granted new ways to move and communicate.
     Later generations of brain implants could help nondisabled people, too, making films like The Matrix and Avatar seem less like fiction and more like everyday life. People could communicate “telepathically,” controlling avatars, drones, and other wireless devices with their thoughts. Someday, say the field’s most futuristic thinkers, we may even be able to upload video games and other entertainment directly into our brains through Wi-Fi implants. Or connect to roving avatars or nanobots and directly experience the inner lives of others.
     It’s no surprise that all this is happening here, home of the silicon revolution and a frontier in neuroscience. In the past few years the two revolutions in human knowledge have been growing closer, and are now colliding: Neuroscientists study computers and employ them for nearly every aspect of their research, and computer scientists look to the human brain as the ultimate information processor.
     Given the Bay Area’s brainpower, says Michel Maharbiz, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and a researcher at CNEP, “the center almost created itself. It’s got people thinking and working at such a high level. The magic is here.”
“Brain-computer interface” refers to anything that directly connects the brain’s information flow, via computer, to an external device. The concept dates back to the 1920s and the invention of the electroencephalograph (EEG), which first recorded and printed out the subtle electrical fluctuations of subjects’ gray matter. (See “The Marriage of Brain and Machine: Past, Present, Future,” page 74.) The science proceeded gradually for 60 years, leading to the development, largely by Michael Merzenich of UCSF, of the multichannel cochlear implant, which today is the most widely used brain-computer interface (BCI). The implant taps into healthy nerves in the inner ear and converts sound into electrical impulses that provide deaf and partially deaf people with a new sense of hearing.