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The Army’s Bold Plan to Turn Soldiers Into Telepaths | Top Stories | DISCOVER Magazine
August 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
by Adam Piore.
The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. The new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.
illustration by Sam Kennedy
On a cold, blustery afternoon the week before Halloween, an assortment of spiritual mediums, animal communicators, and astrologists have set up tables in the concourse beneath the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. The cavernous hall of shops that connects the buildings in this 98-acre complex is a popular venue for autumnal events: Oktoberfest, the Maple Harvest Festival, and today’s “Mystic Fair.”
Traffic is heavy as bureaucrats with ID badges dangling from their necks stroll by during their lunch breaks. Next to the Albany Paranormal Research Society table, a middle-aged woman is solemnly explaining the workings of an electromagnetic sensor that can, she asserts, detect the presence of ghosts. Nearby, a “clairvoyant” ushers a government worker in a suit into her canvas tent. A line has formed at the table of a popular tarot card reader.
Amid all the bustle and transparent hustles, few of the dabblers at the Mystic Fair are aware that there is a genuine mind reader in the building, sitting in an office several floors below the concourse. This mind reader is not able to pluck a childhood memory or the name of a loved one out of your head, at least not yet. But give him time. He is applying hard science to an aspiration that was once relegated to clairvoyants, and unlike his predecessors, he can point to some hard results.
The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center at Albany Medical College. The Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is part of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required to build a thought helmet—a device that can detect and transmit the unspoken speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently.
As improbable as it sounds, synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality. Within a decade Special Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda operatives, communicating and coordinating without hand signals or whispered words. Or a platoon of infantrymen could telepathically call in a helicopter to whisk away their wounded in the midst of a deafening firefight, where intelligible speech would be impossible above the din of explosions.
For a look at the early stages of the technology, I pay a visit to a different sort of cave, Schalk’s bunkerlike office. Finding it is a workout. I hop in an elevator within shouting distance of the paranormal hubbub, then pass through a long, linoleum-floored hallway guarded by a pair of stern-faced sentries, and finally descend a cement stairwell to a subterranean warren of laboratories and offices.
Schalk is sitting in front of an oversize computer screen, surrounded by empty metal bookshelves and white cinder-block walls, bare except for a single photograph of his young family and a poster of the human brain. The fluorescent lighting flickers as he hunches over a desk to click on a computer file. A volunteer from one of his recent mind-reading experiments appears in a video facing a screen of her own. She is concentrating, Schalk explains, silently thinking of one of two vowel sounds, aah or ooh.
The volunteer is clearly no ordinary research subject. She is draped in a hospital gown and propped up in a motorized bed, her head swathed in a plasterlike mold of bandages secured under the chin. Jumbles of wires protrude from an opening at the top of her skull, snaking down to her left shoulder in stringy black tangles. Those wires are connected to 64 electrodes that a neurosurgeon has placed directly on the surface of her naked cortex after surgically removing the top of her skull. “This woman has epilepsy and probably has seizures several times a week,” Schalk says, revealing a slight Germanic accent.
The main goal of this technique, known as electrocorticography, or ECOG, is to identify the exact area of the brain responsible for her seizures, so surgeons can attempt to remove the damaged areas without affecting healthy ones. But there is a huge added benefit: The seizure patients who volunteer for Schalk’s experiments prior to surgery have allowed him and his collaborator, neurosurgeon Eric C. Leuthardt of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, to collect what they claim are among the most detailed pictures ever recorded of what happens in the brain when we imagine speaking words aloud.
Special Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda operatives, communicating without hand signals or whispered words.
Those pictures are a central part of the project funded by the Army’s multi-university research grant and the latest twist on science’s long-held ambition to read what goes on inside the mind. Researchers have been experimenting with ways to understand and harness signals in the areas of the brain that control muscle movement since the early 2000s, and they have developed methods to detect imagined muscle movement, vocalizations, and even the speed with which a subject wants to move a limb.
At Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, researchers have surgically implanted electrodes in the brains of monkeys and trained them to move robotic arms at MIT, hundreds of miles away, just by thinking. At Brown University, scientists are working on a similar implant they hope will allow paralyzed human subjects to control artificial limbs. And workers at Neural Signals Inc., outside Atlanta, have been able to extract vowels from the motor cortex of a paralyzed patient who lost the ability to talk by sinking electrodes into the area of his brain that controls his vocal cords.
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A machine maps electrical brain activity by
measuring magnetic fields around a volunteer’s head.
Courtesy of David Poeppel
But the Army’s thought-helmet project is the first large-scale effort to “really attack” the much broader challenge of synthetic telepathy, Schalk says. The Army wants practical applications for healthy people, “and we are making progress,” he adds.
Schalk is now attempting to make silent speech a reality by using sensors and computers to explore the regions of the brain responsible for storing and processing thoughts. The goal is to build a helmet embedded with brain-scanning technologies that can target specific brain waves, translate them into words, and transmit those words wirelessly to a radio speaker or an earpiece worn by other soldiers.
As Schalk explains his vast ambitions, I’m mesmerized by the eerie video of the bandaged patient on the computer screen. White bars cover her eyes to preserve her anonymity. She is lying stock-still, giving the impression that she might be asleep or comatose, but she is very much engaged. Schalk points with his pen at a large rectangular field on the side of the screen depicting a region of her brain abuzz with electrical activity. Hundreds of yellow and white brain waves dance across a black backdrop, each representing the oscillating electrical pulses picked up by one of the 64 electrodes attached to her cortex as clusters of brain cells fire.
Somewhere in those squiggles lie patterns that Schalk is training his computer to recognize and decode. “To make sense of this is very difficult,” he says. “For each second there are 1,200 variables from each electrode location. It’s a lot of numbers.”
Schalk gestures again toward the video. Above the volunteer’s head is a black bar that extends right or left depending on the computer’s ability to guess which vowel the volunteer has been instructed to imagine: right for “aah,” left for “ooh.” The volunteer imagines “ooh,” and I watch the black bar inch to the left. The volunteer thinks “aah,” and sure enough, the bar extends right, proof that the computer’s analysis of those hundreds of squiggling lines in the black rectangle is correct. In fact, the computer gets it right “close to 100 percent of the time,” Schalk says.
He admits that he is a long way from decoding full, complex imagined sentences with multiple words and meaning. But even extracting two simple vowels from deep within the brain is a big advance. Schalk has no doubt about where his work is leading. “This is the first step toward mind reading,” he tells me.
“Show us the evidence that this could really work—that you are not just hallucinating it,” the Army asked Schmeisser.
The motivating force behind the thought helmet project is a retired Army colonel with a Ph.D. in the physiology of vision and advanced belts in karate, judo, aikido, and Japanese sword fighting. Elmar Schmeisser, a lanky, bespectacled scientist with a receding hairline and a neck the width of a small tree, joined the Army Research Office as a program manager in 2002. He had spent his 30-year career up to that point working in academia and at various military research facilities, exhaustively investigating eyewear to protect soldiers against laser exposure, among other technologies.
Schmeisser had been fascinated by the concept of a thought helmet ever since he read about it in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s 1946 science fiction classic, Skylark of Space, back in the eighth grade. But it was not until 2006, while Schmeisser was attending a conference on advanced prosthetics in Irvine, California, that it really hit him: Science had finally caught up to his boyhood vision. He was listening to a young researcher expound on the virtues of extracting signals from the surface of the brain. The young researcher was Gerwin Schalk.
Schalk’s lecture was causing a stir. Many neuroscientists had long believed that the only way to extract data from the brain specific enough to control an external device was to penetrate the cortex and sink electrodes into the gray matter, where the electrodes could record the firing of individual neurons. By claiming that he could pry information from the brain without drilling deep inside it—information that could allow a subject to move a computer cursor, play computer games, and even move a prosthetic limb—Schalk was taking on “a very strong existing dogma in the field that the only way to know about how the brain works is by recording individual neurons,” Schmeisser vividly recalls of that day.
Many of those present dismissed Schalk’s findings as blasphemy and stood up to attack it. But for Schmeisser it was a magical moment. If he could take Schalk’s idea one step further and find a way to extract verbal thoughts from the brain without surgery, the technology could dramatically benefit not only disabled people but the healthy as well. “Everything,” he says,” all of a sudden became possible.”
The next year, Schmeisser marched into a large conference room at Army Research Office headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, to pitch a research project to investigate synthetic telepathy for soldiers. He took his place at a podium facing a large, U-shaped table fronting rows of chairs, where a committee of some 30 senior scientists and colleagues—division chiefs, directorate heads, mathematicians, particle physicists, chemists, computer scientists, and Pentagon brass in civilian dress—waited for him to begin.
Schmeisser had 10 minutes and six PowerPoint slides to address four major questions: Where was the field at the moment? How might his idea prove important? What would the Army get out of it? And was there reason to believe that it was doable?
The first three questions were simple. It was that last one that tripped him up. “Does this really work?” Schmeisser remembers the committee asking him. “Show us the evidence that this could really work—that you are not just hallucinating it.”
The committee rejected Schmeisser’s proposal but authorized him to collect more data over the following year to bolster his case. For assistance he turned to Schalk, the man who had gotten him thinking about a thought helmet in the first place.
Schalk and Leuthardt had been conducting mind-reading experiments for several years, exploring their patients’ ability to play video games, move cursors, and type by means of brain waves picked up via a scanner. The two men were eager to push their research further and expand into areas of the brain thought to be associated with language, so when Schmeisser offered them a $450,000 grant to prove the feasibility of a thought helmet, they seized the opportunity.
Schalk and Leuthardt quickly recruited 12 epilepsy patients as volunteers for their first set of experiments. As I had seen in the video in Schalk’s office, each patient had the top of his skull removed and electrodes affixed to the surface of the cortex. The researchers then set up a computer screen and speakers in front of the patients’ beds.
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The patients were presented with 36 words that had a relatively simple consonant-vowel-consonant structure, such as bet, bat, beat, and boot. They were asked to say the words out loud and then to simply imagine saying them. Those instructions were conveyed visually (written on a computer screen) with no audio, and again vocally with no video. The electrodes provided a precise map of the resulting neural activity.
Schalk was intrigued by the results. As one might expect, when the subjects vocalized a word, the data indicated activity in the areas of the motor cortex associated with the muscles that produce speech. The auditory cortex and an area in its vicinity long believed to be associated with speech, called Wernicke’s area, were also active.
When the subjects imagined words, the motor cortex went silent while the auditory cortex and Wernicke’s area remained active. Although it was unclear why those areas were active, what they were doing, and what it meant, the raw results were an important start. The next step was obvious: Reach inside the brain and try to pluck out enough data to determine, at least roughly, what the subjects were thinking.
Schmeisser presented Schalk’s data to the Army committee the following year and asked it to fund a formal project to develop a real mind-reading helmet. As he conceived it, the helmet would function as a wearable interface between mind and machine. When activated, sensors inside would scan the thousands of brain waves oscillating in a soldier’s head; a microprocessor would apply pattern recognition software to decode those waves and translate them into specific sentences or words, and a radio would transmit the message. Schmeisser also proposed adding a second capability to the helmet to detect the direction in which a soldier was focusing his attention. The function could be used to steer thoughts to a specific comrade or squad, just by looking in their direction.
The words or sentences would reach a receiver that would then “speak” the words into a comrade’s earpiece or be played from a speaker, perhaps at a distant command post. The possibilities were easy to imagine:
“Look out! Enemy on the right!”
“We need a medical evacuation now!”
“The enemy is standing on the ridge. Fire!”
Any of those phrases could be life-saving.
This time the committee signed off.
Grant applications started piling up in Schmeisser’s office. To maximize the chance of success, he decided to split the Army funding between two university teams that were taking complementary approaches to the telepathy problem.
The first team, directed by Schalk, was pursuing the more invasive ECOG approach, attaching electrodes beneath the skull. The second group, led by Mike D’Zmura, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, planned to use electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive brain-scanning technique that was far better suited for an actual thought helmet. Like ECOG, EEG relies on brain signals picked up by an array of electrodes that are sensitive to the subtle voltage oscillations caused by the firing of groups of neurons. Unlike ECOG, EEG requires no surgery; the electrodes attach painlessly to the scalp.
For Schmeisser, this practicality was critical. He ultimately wanted answers to the big neuroscience questions that would allow researchers to capture complicated thoughts and ideas, yet he also knew that demonstrating even a rudimentary thought helmet capable of discerning simple commands would be a valuable achievement. After all, soldiers often use formulaic and reduced vocabulary to communicate. Calling in a helicopter for a medical evacuation, for instance, requires only a handful of specific words.
“We could start there,” Schmeisser says. “We could start below that.” He noted, for instance, that it does not require a terribly complicated message to call for an air strike or a missile launch: “That would be a very nice operational capability.”
The relative ease with which EEG can be applied comes at a price, however. The exact location of neural activity is far more difficult to discern via EEG than with many other, more invasive methods because the skull, scalp, and cerebral fluid surrounding the brain scatter its electric signals before they reach the electrodes. That blurring also makes the signals harder to detect at all. The EEG data can be so messy, in fact, that some of the researchers who signed on to the project harbored private doubts about whether it could really be used to extract the signals associated with unspoken thoughts.
In the initial months of the project, back in 2008, one of D’Zmura’s key collaborators, renowned neuroscientist David Poeppel, sat in his office on the second floor of the New York University psychology building and realized he was unsure even where to begin. With his research partner Greg Hickok, an expert on the neuroscience of language, he had developed a detailed model of audible speech systems, parts of which were widely cited in textbooks. But there was nothing in that model to suggest how to measure something imagined.
For more than 100 years, Poeppel reflected, speech experimentation had followed a simple plan: Ask a subject to listen to a specific word or phrase, measure the subject’s response to that word (for instance, how long it takes him to repeat it aloud), and then demonstrate how that response is connected to activity in the brain. Trying to measure imagined speech was much more complicated; a random thought could throw off the whole experiment. In fact, it was still unclear where in the brain researchers should even look for the relevant signals.
Solving this problem would call for a new experimental method, Poeppel realized. He and a postdoctoral student, Xing Tian, decided to take advantage of a powerful imaging technique called magnetoencephalography, or MEG, to do their reconnaissance work. MEG can provide roughly the same level of spatial detail as ECOG but without the need to remove part of a subject’s skull, and it is far more accurate than EEG.
Poeppel and Tian would guide subjects into a three-ton, beige-paneled room constructed of a special alloy and copper to shield against passing electromagnetic fields. At the center of the room sat a one-ton, six-foot-tall machine resembling a huge hair dryer that contained scanners capable of recording the minute magnetic fields produced by the firing of neurons. After guiding subjects into the device, the researchers would ask them to imagine speaking words like athlete, musician, and lunch. Next they asked them to imagine hearing the words.
When Poeppel sat down to analyze the results, he noticed something unusual. As a subject imagined hearing words, his auditory cortex lit up the screen in a characteristic pattern of reds and greens. That part was no surprise; previous studies had linked the auditory cortex to imagined sounds. However, when a subject was asked to imagine speaking a word rather than hearing it, the auditory cortex flashed an almost identical red and green pattern.
Poeppel was initially stumped by the results. “That is really bizarre,” he recalls thinking. “Why should there be an auditory pattern when the subjects didn’t speak and no one around them spoke?” Over time he arrived at an explanation. Scientists had long been aware of an error-correction mechanism in the brain associated with motor commands. When the brain sends a command to the motor cortex to, for instance, reach out and grab a cup of water, it also creates an internal impression, known as an efference copy, of what the resulting movement will look and feel like. That way, the brain can check the muscle output against the intended action and make any necessary corrections.
Poeppel believed he was looking at an efference copy of speech in the auditory cortex. “When you plan to speak, you activate the hearing part of your brain before you say the word,” he explains. “Your brain is predicting what it will sound like.”
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The potential significance of this finding was not lost on Poeppel. If the brain held on to a copy of what an imagined thought would sound like if vocalized, it might be possible to capture that neurological record and translate it into intelligible words. As happens so often in this field of research, though, each discovery brought with it a wave of new challenges. Building a thought helmet would require not only identifying that efference copy but also finding a way to isolate it from a mass of brain waves.
D’Zmura and his team at UC Irvine have spent the past two years taking baby steps in that direction by teaching pattern recognition programs to search for and recognize specific phrases and words. The sheer size of a MEG machine would obviously be impractical in a military setting, so the team is testing its techniques using lightweight EEG caps that could eventually be built into a practical thought helmet.
The caps are comfortable enough that Tom Lappas, a graduate student working with D’Zmura, often volunteers to be a research subject. During one experiment last November, Lappas sat in front of a computer wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a latex EEG cap with 128 gel-soaked electrodes attached to it. Lappas’s face was a mask of determined focus as he stared silently at a screen while military commands blared out of a nearby speaker.
“Ready Baron go to red now,” a recorded voice intoned, then paused. “Ready Eagle go to red now…Ready Tiger go to green now…” As Lappas concentrated, a computer recorded hundreds of squiggly lines representing Lappas’s brain activity as it was picked up from the surface of his scalp. Somewhere in that mass of data, Lappas hoped, were patterns unique enough to distinguish the sentences from one another.
With so much information, the problem would not be finding similarities but rather filtering out the similarities that were irrelevant. Something as simple as the blink of an eye creates a tremendous number of squiggles and lines that might throw off the recognition program. To make matters more challenging, Lappas decided at this early stage in the experiment to search for patterns not only in the auditory cortex but in other areas of the brain as well.
That expanded search added to the data his computer had to crunch through. In the end, the software was able to identify the sentence a test subject was imagining speaking only about 45 percent of the time. The result was hardly up to military standards; an error rate of 55 percent would be disastrous on the battlefield.
Schmeisser is not distressed by that high error rate. He is confident that synthetic telepathy can and will rapidly improve to the point where it will be useful in combat. “When we first started this, we didn’t know if it could be done,” he says. “That we have gotten this far is wonderful.” Poeppel agrees. “The fact that they could find anything just blows me away, frankly,” he says.
Schmeisser notes that D’Zmura has already shown that test subjects can type in Morse code by thinking of specific vowels in dots and dashes. Although this exercise is not actual language, subjects have achieved an accuracy of close to 100 percent.
The next steps in getting a thought helmet to work with actual language will be improving the accuracy of the pattern-recognition programs used by Schalk’s and D’Zmura’s teams and then adding, little by little, to the library of words that these programs can discern. “Whether we can get to fully free-flowing, civilian-type speech, I don’t know. It would be nice. We’re pushing the limits of what we can get, opening the vocabulary as much as we can,” Schmeisser says.
For some concerned citizens, this research is pushing too far. Among the more paranoid set, the mere fact that the military is trying to create a thought helmet is proof of a conspiracy to subject the masses to mind control. More grounded critics consider the project ethically questionable. Since the Army’s thought helmet project became publicly known, Schmeisser has been deluged with Freedom of Information Act requests from individuals and organizations concerned about privacy issues. Those requests for documentation have required countless hours and continue to this day.
Schalk, for his part, has resolved to keep a low profile. From his experience working with more invasive techniques, he had seen his fair share of controversy in the field, and he anticipated that this project might attract close scrutiny. “All you need to do is say, ‘The U.S. Army funds studies to implant people for mind reading,’ ” he says. “That’s all it takes, and then you’re going to have to do damage control.”
D’Zmura and the rest of his team, perhaps to their regret, granted interviews about their preliminary research after it was announced in a UC Irvine press release. The negative reaction was immediate. Bizarre e-mail messages began appearing in D’Zmura’s in-box from individuals ranting against the government or expressing concern that the authorities were already monitoring their thoughts. One afternoon, a woman appeared outside D’Zmura’s office complaining of voices in her head and asking for assistance to remove them.
Should synthetic telepathy make significant progress, the worried voices will surely grow louder. “Once we cross these barriers, we are doing something that has never before been done in human history, which is to get information directly from the brain,” says Emory University bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, a leading voice in the field of neuroethics. “I don’t have a problem with sticking this helmet on the head of a pilot to allow him to send commands on a plane. The problem comes when you try to get detailed information about what someone is either thinking or saying nonverbally. That’s something else altogether. The skull should remain a realm of absolute privacy. If the right to privacy means anything, it means the right to the contents of my thoughts.”
Schmeisser says he has been reflecting on this kind of concern “from the beginning.” He dismisses the most extreme type of worry out of hand. “The very nature of the technology and of the human brain,” he maintains, “would prevent any Big Brother type of use.” Even the most sophisticated existing speech-recognition programs can obtain only 95 percent accuracy, and that is after being calibrated and trained by a user to compensate for accent, intonation, and phrasing. Brain waves are “much harder” to get right, Schmeisser notes, because every brain is anatomically different and uniquely shaped by experience.
Merely calibrating a program to recognize a simple sentence from brain waves would take hours. “If your thoughts wander for just an instant, the computer is completely lost,” Schmeisser says. “So the method is completely ethical. There is no way to coerce users into training the machine if they don’t want to. Any attempt to apply coercion will result in more brain wave disorganization, from stress if nothing else, and produce even worse computer performance.” Despite the easy analogies, synthetic telepathy bears little resemblance to mystical notions of mind reading and mind control. The bottom line, Schmeisser insists, “is that I see no risks whatsoever. Only benefits.”
Nor does he feel any unease that his funding comes from a military agency eager to put synthetic telepathy to use on the battlefield. The way he sees it, the potential payoff is simply too great.
“This project is attempting to make the scientific breakthrough that will have application for many things,” Schmeisser says. “If we can get at the black box we call the brain with the reduced dimensionality of speech, then we will have made a beginning to solving fundamental challenges in understanding how the brain works—and, with that, of understanding individuality.”
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/15-armys-bold-plan-turn-soldiers-into-telepaths/article_print
Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops. By Thomas Goetz
July 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
From WIRED.
The premise of a feedback loop is simple: Provide people with information about their actions in real time, then give them a chance to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors.
Photo: Kevin Van Aelst
In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones.
Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity.
So city engineers decided to take another approach. In five Garden Grove school zones, they put up what are known as dynamic speed displays, or driver feedback signs: a speed limit posting coupled with a radar sensor attached to a huge digital readout announcing “Your Speed.”
The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn’t tell drivers anything they didn’t already know—there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it. For another thing, the signs used radar, which decades earlier had appeared on American roads as a talisman technology, reserved for police officers only. Now Garden Grove had scattered radar sensors along the side of the road like traffic cones. And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up—no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.
In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.
The results fascinated and delighted the city officials. In the vicinity of the schools where the dynamic displays were installed, drivers slowed an average of 14 percent. Not only that, at three schools the average speed dipped below the posted speed limit. Since this experiment, Garden Grove has installed 10 more driver feedback signs. “Frankly, it’s hard to get people to slow down,” says Dan Candelaria, Garden Grove’s traffic engineer. “But these encourage people to do the right thing.”
In the years since the Garden Grove project began, radar technology has dropped steadily in price and Your Speed signs have proliferated on American roadways. Yet despite their ubiquity, the signs haven’t faded into the landscape like so many other motorist warnings. Instead, they’ve proven to be consistently effective at getting drivers to slow down—reducing speeds, on average, by about 10 percent, an effect that lasts for several miles down the road. Indeed, traffic engineers and safety experts consider them to be more effective at changing driving habits than a cop with a radar gun. Despite their redundancy, despite their lack of repercussions, the signs have accomplished what seemed impossible: They get us to let up on the gas.
The signs leverage what’s called a feedback loop, a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior. The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction. It’s the operating principle behind a home thermostat, which fires the furnace to maintain a specific temperature, or the consumption display in a Toyota Prius, which tends to turn drivers into so-called hypermilers trying to wring every last mile from the gas tank. But the simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive. They are in fact powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior patterns, even those that seem intractable. Just as important, they can be used to encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. In other words, feedback loops change human behavior. And thanks to an explosion of new technology, the opportunity to put them into action in nearly every part of our lives is quickly becoming a reality.
A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
This basic framework has been shaped and refined by thinkers and researchers for ages. In the 18th century, engineers developed regulators and governors to modulate steam engines and other mechanical systems, an early application of feedback loops that later became codified into control theory, the engineering discipline behind everything from aerospace to robotics. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expanded on this work in the 1940s, devising the field of cybernetics, which analyzed how feedback loops operate in machinery and electronics and explored how those principles might be broadened to human systems.
Over the past 40 years, feedback loops have been thoroughly researched and validated in psychology, epidemiology, military strategy, environmental studies, engineering, and economics.Illustration: Ulla Puggaard
The potential of the feedback loop to affect behavior was explored in the 1960s, most notably in the work of Albert Bandura, a Stanford University psychologist and pioneer in the study of behavior change and motivation. Drawing on several education experiments involving children, Bandura observed that giving individuals a clear goal and a means to evaluate their progress toward that goal greatly increased the likelihood that they would achieve it. He later expanded this notion into the concept of self-efficacy, which holds that the more we believe we can meet a goal, the more likely we will do so. In the 40 years since Bandura’s early work, feedback loops have been thoroughly researched and validated in psychology, epidemiology, military strategy, environmental studies, engineering, and economics. (In typical academic fashion, each discipline tends to reinvent the methodology and rephrase the terminology, but the basic framework remains the same.) Feedback loops are a common tool in athletic training plans, executive coaching strategies, and a multitude of other self-improvement programs (though some are more true to the science than others).
Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don’t often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn’t really scaled.
Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It’s just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.
Illustration: Leo Jung
That’s quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors. Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.
In the past two or three years, the plunging price of sensors has begun to foster a feedback-loop revolution. Just as Your Speed signs have been adopted worldwide because the cost of radar technology keeps dropping, other feedback loops are popping up everywhere because sensors keep getting cheaper and better at monitoring behavior and capturing data in all sorts of environments. These new, less expensive devices include accelerometers (which measure motion), GPS sensors (which track location), and inductance sensors (which measure electric current). Accelerometers have dropped to less than $1 each—down from as much as $20 a decade ago—which means they can now be built into tennis shoes, MP3 players, and even toothbrushes. Radio-frequency ID chips are being added to prescription pill bottles, student ID cards, and casino chips. And inductance sensors that were once deployed only in heavy industry are now cheap and tiny enough to be connected to residential breaker boxes, letting consumers track their home’s entire energy diet.
Of course, technology has been tracking what people do for years. Call-center agents have been monitored closely since the 1990s, and the nation’s tractor-trailer fleets have long been equipped with GPS and other location sensors—not just to allow drivers to follow their routes but so that companies can track their cargo and the drivers. But those are top-down, Big Brother techniques. The true power of feedback loops is not to control people but to give them control. It’s like the difference between a speed trap and a speed feedback sign—one is a game of gotcha, the other is a gentle reminder of the rules of the road. The ideal feedback loop gives us an emotional connection to a rational goal.
And today, their promise couldn’t be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world’s biggest challenges. Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. Consider our problems with carbon emissions, where managing personal energy consumption could be the difference between a climate under control and one beyond help. And feedback loops aren’t just about solving problems. They could create opportunities. Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules. They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions. Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades.
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How a Feedback Loop Works |
A modified traffic sign can have a profound effect on drivers’ behavior. Here’s what happens. |
1 Evidence The radar-equipped sign flashes a car’s current speed. First comes the data—quantifying a behavior and presenting that data back to the individual so they know where they stand. After all, you can’t change what you don’t measure.
2 Relevance The sign also displays the legal speed limit—most people don’t want to be seen as bad drivers. Data is just digits unless it hits home. Through information design, social context, or some other proxy for meaning, the right incentive will transform rational information into an emotional imperative.
3 Consequences People are reminded of the downside of speeding, including traffic tickets and the risk of accidents. Even compelling information is useless unless it ties into some larger goal or purpose. People must have a sense of what to do with the information and any opportunities they will have to act on it.
4 Action Drivers slow an average of 10 percent—usually for several miles. The individual has to engage with all of the above and act—thus closing the loop and allowing that new action to be measured.
In 2006, Shwetak Patel, then a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, was working on a problem: How could technology help provide remote care for the elderly? The obvious approach would be to install cameras and motion detectors throughout a home, so that observers could see when somebody fell or became sick. Patel found those methods unsophisticated and impractical. “Installing cameras or motion sensors everywhere is unreasonably expensive,” he says. “It might work in theory, but it just won’t happen in practice. So I wondered what would give us the same information and be reasonably priced and easy to deploy. I found those really interesting constraints.”
The answer, Patel realized, is that every home emits something called voltage noise. Think of it as a steady hum in the electrical wires that varies depending on what systems are drawing power. If there were some way to disaggregate this noise, it might be possible to deliver much the same information as cameras and motion sensors. Lights going on and off, for instance, would mean that someone had moved from room to room. If a blender were left on, that might signal that someone had fallen—or had forgotten about the blender, perhaps indicating dementia. If we could hear electricity usage, Patel thought, we could know what was happening inside the house.
A nifty idea, but how to make it happen? The problem wasn’t measuring the voltage noise; that’s easily tracked with a few sensors. The challenge was translating the cacophony of electromagnetic interference into the symphony of signals given off by specific appliances and devices and lights. Finding that pattern amid the noise became the focus of Patel’s PhD work, and in a few years he had both his degree and his answer: a stack of algorithms that could discern a blender from a light switch from a television set and so on. All this data could be captured not by sensors in every electrical outlet throughout the house but through a single device plugged into a single outlet.
This, Patel soon realized, went way beyond elder care. His approach could inform ordinary consumers, in real time, about where the energy they paid for every month was going. “We kind of stumbled across this stuff,” Patel says. “But we realized that, combined with data on the house’s overall draw on power”—which can be measured through a second sensor easily installed at the circuit box—”we were getting really great information about resource consumption in the home. And that could be more than interesting information. It could encourage behavior change.”
By 2008, Patel had started a new job in the computer science and engineering departments at the University of Washington, and his idea had been turned into the startup Zensi. At Washington, he focused on devising similar techniques to monitor home consumption of water and gas. The solutions were even more elegant, perhaps, than the one for monitoring electricity. A transducer affixed to an outdoor spigot can detect changes in water pressure that correspond to the resident’s water usage. That data can then be disaggregated to distinguish a leaky toilet from an over-indulgent bather. And a microphone sensor on a gas meter listens to changes in the regulator to determine how much gas is consumed.
Last year, consumer electronics company Belkin acquired Zensi and made energy conservation a centerpiece of its corporate strategy, with feedback loops as the guiding principle. Belkin has begun modestly, with a device called the Conserve Insight. It’s an outlet adapter that gives consumers a close read of the power used by one select appliance: Plug it into a wall socket and then plug an appliance or gadget into it and a small display shows how much energy the device is consuming, in both watts and dollars. It’s a window onto how energy is actually used, but it’s only a proof-of-concept prototype of the more ambitious product, based on Patel’s PhD work, that Belkin will begin beta-testing in Chicago later this year with an eye toward commercial release in 2013. The company calls it Zorro.
At first glance, the Zorro is just another so-called smart meter, not that different from the boxes that many power companies have been installing in consumers’ homes, with a vague promise that the meters will educate citizens and provide better data to the utility. To the surprise of the utility companies, though, these smart meters have been greeted with hostility in some communities. A small but vocal number of customers object to being monitored, while others worry that the radiation from RFID transmitters is unhealthy (though this has been measured at infinitesimal levels).
Politics aside, in pure feedback terms smart meters fail on at least two levels. For one, the information goes to the utility first, rather than directly to the consumer. For another, most smart meters aren’t very smart; they typically measure overall household consumption, not how much power is being consumed by which specific device or appliance. In other words, they are a broken feedback loop.
Belkin’s device avoids these pitfalls by giving the data directly to consumers and delivering it promptly and continuously. “Real-time feedback is key to conservation,” says Kevin Ashton, Zensi’s former CEO who took over Belkin’s Conserve division after the acquisition. “There’s a visceral impact when you see for yourself how much your toaster is costing you.”
The Zorro is just the first of several Belkin products that Ashton believes will put feedback loops into effect throughout the home. Ashton worked on RFID chips at MIT in the late 1990s and lays claim to coining the phrase “Internet of Things,” meaning a world of interconnected, sensor-laden devices and objects. He predicts that home sensors will one day inform choices in all aspects of our lives. “We’re consuming so many things without thinking about them—energy, plastic, paper, calories. I can envision a ubiquitous sensor network, a platform for real-time feedback that will enhance the comfort, security, and control of our lives.”
As a starting point for a consumer products company, that’s not half bad.
A Feedback Loop for
Every Goal
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Rypple Work Better Rypple’s online platform helps workers give and receive feedback. Picture it as Facebook for the office: Users can set up private projects, post comments, make their goals public, and even assign badges to one another’s profiles. Supervisors can use it to track the progress of their employees, and there’s a tool for coaching workers and managers. -
Zeo Sleep Better Zeo’s headband measures the brainwaves that are correlated with sleep quality, and a bedside monitor presents users with a score in the morning. The display also shows the amount of time spent in various sleep cycles and how long it took you to fall asleep. If you’re sleeping poorly, Zeo’s online tools will ask you questions—Do your kids sleep in your bed? Do you have pets? Do you exercise?—then offer up strategies for better sleep. -
Belkin Conserve Insight Conserver Better Belkin makes a simple plug-in device that measures the power consumed by any appliance. It then translates that into cash burned and carbon emitted. The idea is to help consumers budget their energy use by showing them how much their electronics cost. -
GreenRoad Drive Better GreenRoad’s in-vehicle display uses GPS and accelerometers to let drivers spot and correct risky or fuel- inefficient driving habits in real time. Red, yellow, and green lights on the dash warn drivers when they’re making too many dangerous moves—like accelerating into turns or stopping suddenly. (The data is also posted online so supervisors can review employees’ driving and see if certain routes or shifts are more hazardous for their drivers.) -
GreenGoose Liver Better GreenGoose uses wireless sensors and simple game mechanics to encourage behaviors like brushing your teeth, riding your bike, and walking your dog. Users get points as rewards for their everyday actions and bonus points for consistency. Starting this fall, people will be able to use those points in simple online games.
If there is one problem in medicine that confounds doctors, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies alike, it’s noncompliance, the unfriendly term for patients who don’t follow doctors’ orders. Most vexing are those who don’t take their medications as prescribed—which, it turns out, is pretty much most of us. Studies have shown that about half of patients who are prescribed medication take their pills as directed. For drugs like statins, which must be used for years, the rate is even worse, dropping to around 30 percent after a year. (Since the effect of these drugs can be invisible, the thinking goes, patients don’t detect any benefit.) Research has found that noncompliance adds $100 billion annually to US health care costs and leads to 125,000 unnecessary deaths from cardiovascular diseases alone every year. And it can be blamed almost entirely on human foibles—people failing to do what they know they should.
David Rose is a perfect example of this. He has a family history of heart disease. Now 44, he began taking medication for high blood pressure a few years ago, making him not so different from the nearly one-third of Americans with hypertension. Where Rose is exceptional is in his capacity to do something about noncompliance. He has a knack for inventing beautiful, engaging, alluring objects that get people to do things like take their pills.
A decade ago, Rose, whose stylish glasses and soft-spoken manner bring to mind a college music teacher, started a company called Ambient Devices. His most famous product is the Orb, a translucent sphere that turns different colors to reflect different information inputs. If your stocks go down, it might glow red; if it snows, it might glow white, and so on, depending on what information you tell the Orb you are interested in. It’s a whimsical product and is still available for purchase online. But as far as Rose is concerned, the Orb was merely a prelude to his next company, Vitality, and its marquee product: the GlowCap.
The device is simple. When a patient is prescribed a medication, a physician or pharmacy provides a GlowCap to go on top of the pill bottle, replacing the standard childproof cap. The GlowCap, which comes with a plug-in unit that Rose calls a night-light, connects to a database that knows the patient’s particular dosage directions—say, two pills twice a day, at 8 am and 8 pm. When 8 am rolls around, the GlowCap and the night-light start to pulse with a gentle orange light. A few minutes later, if the pill bottle isn’t opened, the light pulses a little more urgently. A few minutes more and the device begins to play a melody—not an annoying buzz or alarm. Finally, if more time elapses (the intervals are adjustable), the patient receives a text message or a recorded phone call reminding them to pop the GlowCap. The overall effect is a persistent feedback loop urging patients to take their meds.
These nudges have proven to be remarkably effective. In 2010, Partners HealthCare and Harvard Medical School conducted a study that gave GlowCaps to 140 patients on hypertension medications; a control group received nonactivated GlowCap bottles. After three months, adherence in the control group had declined to less than 50 percent, the same dismal rate observed in countless other studies. But patients using GlowCaps did remarkably better: More than 80 percent of them took their pills, a rate that lasted for the duration of the six-month study.
The power of the device can perhaps be explained by the fact that the GlowCap incorporates several schools of behavioral change. Vitality has experimented with charging consumers for the product, drawing on the behavioral-economics theory that people are more willing to use something they’ve paid for. But in other circumstances the company has given users a financial reward for taking their medication, using a carrot-and-stick methodology. Different models work for different people, Rose says. “We use reminders and social incentives and financial incentives—whatever we can,” he says. “We want to provide enough feedback so that it’s complementary to people’s lives, but not so much that you can’t handle the onslaught.”
Here Rose grapples with an essential challenge of feedback loops: Make them too passive and you’ll lose your audience as the data blurs into the background of everyday life. Make them too intrusive and the data turns into noise, which is easily ignored. Borrowing a concept from cognitive psychology called pre-attentive processing, Rose aims for a sweet spot between these extremes, where the information is delivered unobtrusively but noticeably. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical.
This approach to information delivery is a radical departure from how our health care system usually works. Conventional wisdom holds that medical information won’t be heeded unless it sets off alarms. Instead of glowing orbs, we’re pummeled with FDA cautions and Surgeon General warnings and front-page reports, all of which serve to heighten our anxiety about our health. This fear-based approach can work—for a while. But fear, it turns out, is a poor catalyst for sustained behavioral change. After all, biologically our fear response girds us for short-term threats. If nothing threatening actually happens, the fear dissipates. If this happens too many times, we end up simply dismissing the alarms.
It’s worth noting here how profoundly difficult it is for most people to improve their health. Consider: Self-directed smoking-cessation programs typically work for perhaps 5 percent of participants, and weight-loss programs are considered effective if people lose as little as 5 percent of their body weight. Part of the problem is that so much in our lives—the foods we eat, the ads we see, the things our culture celebrates—is driven by feedback loops that sustain bad behaviors. But we can counterprogram this onslaught with another feedback loop, increasing our odds of changing course.
Though GlowCaps improved compliance by an astonishing 40 percent, feedback loops more typically improve outcomes by about 10 percent compared to traditional methods. That 10 percent figure is surprisingly persistent; it turns up in everything from home energy monitors to smoking cessation programs to those Your Speed signs. At first glance, 10 percent may not seem like a lot. After all, if you’re 250 pounds and obese, losing 25 pounds is a start, but your BMI is likely still in the red zone. But it turns out that 10 percent does matter. A lot. An obese 40-year-old man would spare himself three years of hypertension and nearly two years of diabetes by losing 10 percent of his weight. A 10 percent reduction in home energy consumption could reduce carbon emissions by as much as 20 percent (generating energy during peak demand periods creates more pollution than off-peak generation). And those Your Speed signs? It turns out that reducing speeds by 10 percent from 40 to 35 mph would cut fatal injuries by about half.
In other words, 10 percent is something of an inflection point, where lots of great things happen. The results are measurable, the economics calculable. “The value of behavior change is incredibly large: nearly $5,000 a year,” says David Rose, citing a CVS pharmacy white paper. “At that rate, we can afford to give every diabetic a connected glucometer. We can give the morbidly obese a Wi-Fi-enabled scale and a pedometer. The value is there; the savings are there. The cost of the sensors is negligible.”
So feedback loops work. Why? Why does putting our own data in front of us somehow compel us to act? In part, it’s that feedback taps into something core to the human experience, even to our biological origins. Like any organism, humans are self-regulating creatures, with a multitude of systems working to achieve homeostasis. Evolution itself, after all, is a feedback loop, albeit one so elongated as to be imperceptible by an individual. Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it’s something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford’s Bandura put it, “People are proactive, aspiring organisms.” Feedback taps into those aspirations.
The visceral satisfaction and even pleasure we get from feedback loops is the organizing principle behind GreenGoose, a startup being hatched by Brian Krejcarek, a Minnesota native who wears a near-constant smile, so enthusiastic is he about the power of cheap sensors. His mission is to stitch feedback loops into the fabric of our daily lives, one sensor at a time.
As Krejcarek describes it, GreenGoose started with a goal not too different from Shwetak Patel’s: to measure household consumption of energy. But the company’s mission took a turn in 2009, when he experimented with putting one of those ever-cheaper accelerometers on a bicycle wheel. As the wheel rotated, the sensor picked up the movement, and before long Krejcarek had a vision of a grander plan. “I wondered what else we could measure. Where else could we stick these things?” The answer he came up with: everywhere. The GreenGoose concept starts with a sheet of stickers, each containing an accelerometer labeled with a cartoon icon of a familiar household object—a refrigerator handle, a water bottle, a toothbrush, a yard rake. But the secret to GreenGoose isn’t the accelerometer; that’s a less-than-a-dollar commodity. The key is the algorithm that Krejcarek’s team has coded into the chip next to the accelerometer that recognizes a particular pattern of movement. For a toothbrush, it’s a rapid back-and-forth that indicates somebody is brushing their teeth. For a water bottle, it’s a simple up-and-down that correlates with somebody taking a sip. And so on. In essence, GreenGoose uses sensors to spray feedback loops like atomized perfume throughout our daily life—in our homes, our vehicles, our backyards. “Sensors are these little eyes and ears on whatever we do and how we do it,” Krejcarek says. “If a behavior has a pattern, if we can calculate a desired duration and intensity, we can create a system that rewards that behavior and encourages more of it.” Thus the first component of a feedback loop: data gathering.
Then comes the second step: relevance. GreenGoose converts the data into points, with a certain amount of action translating into a certain number of points, say 30 seconds of teeth brushing for two points. And here Krejcarek gets noticeably excited. “The points can be used in games on our website,” he says. “Think FarmVille but with live data.” Krejcarek plans to open the platform to game developers, who he hopes will create games that are simple, easy, and sticky. A few hours of raking leaves might build up points that can be used in a gardening game. And the games induce people to earn more points, which means repeating good behaviors. The idea, Krejcarek says, is to “create a bridge between the real world and the virtual world. This has all got to be fun.”
As powerful as the idea appears now, just a few months ago it seemed like a fading pipe dream. Then based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Krejcarek had nearly run out of cash—not just for his company, but for himself. During the day, he was working on GreenGoose in a office building near the MIT campus—and each night, he’d sneak into the building’s air shaft, where he’d stashed an air mattress and some clothes. Then, in late February, he went to the Launch conference in San Francisco, a two-day event where select entrepreneurs get a chance to demo their company to potential funders. Krejcarek hadn’t been selected for an onstage demo, but when the conference organizers saw a crowd eyeing his product on the exhibit floor, he was given four minutes to make a presentation. It was one of those only-in-Silicon Valley moments. The crowd “just got it,” he recalls. Within days, he had nearly $600,000 in new funding. He moved to San Francisco, rented an apartment—and bought a bed. GreenGoose will release its first product, a kit of sensors that encourage pet owners to play and interact with their dogs, with sensors for dog collar, pet toys, and dog doors, sometime this fall.
Part of the excitement around GreenGoose is that the company is so good at “gamification,” the much-blogged-about notion that game elements like points or levels can be applied to various aspects of our lives. Gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun—just sprinkle a little videogame magic and suddenly a burden turns into bliss. But as happens with fads, gamification is both overhyped and misunderstood. It is too often just a shorthand for badges or points, like so many gold stars on a spelling test. But just as no number of gold stars can trick children into thinking that yesterday’s quiz was fun, game mechanics, to work, must be an informing principle, not a veneer.
With its savvy application of feedback loops, though, GreenGoose is onto more than just the latest fad. The company represents the fruition of a long-promised technological event horizon: the Internet of Things, in which a sensor-rich world measures our every action. This vision, championed by Kevin Ashton at Belkin, Sandy Pentland at MIT, and Bruce Sterling in the pages of this magazine, has long had the whiff of vaporware, something promised by futurists but never realized. But as GreenGoose, Belkin, and other companies begin to use sensors to deploy feedback loops throughout our lives, we can finally see the potential of a sensor-rich environment. The Internet of Things isn’t about the things; it’s about us.
For now, the reality still isn’t as sexy as the visions. Stickers on toothbrushes and plugs in wall sockets aren’t exactly disappearing technology. But maybe requiring people to do a little work—to stick accelerometers around their house or plug a device into a wall socket—is just enough of a nudge to get our brains engaged in the prospect for change. Perhaps it’s good to have the infrastructure of feedback loops just a bit visible now, before they disappear into our environments altogether, so that they can serve as a subtle reminder that we have something to change, that we can do better—and that the tools for doing better are rapidly, finally, turning up all around us.
Thomas Goetz (thomas@wired.com) is the executive editor of Wired. His latest book, The Decision Tree, is now out in paperback.
Backwards step on looking into the future. By Ben Goldacre
April 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Guardian, Saturday 23 April 2011.
Scientific journals can be as bad as newspapers in preferring eye-catching stories to negative findings
Last year a mainstream psychology researcher called Daryl Bem published a competent academic paper, in a well-respected journal, showing evidence of precognition – the ability to see the future. Instead of designing new studies to see whether people could consciously tell you about the future, he ran some classic psychology experiments backwards.
In experiments on subliminal influence, participants are presented with two mirror images of the same picture. They are asked which they prefer, and are likely to choose the images where a subliminal negative image is flashed up for milliseconds, before they make their choice. In the Bem study, the negative images were flashed up after they made their choice, but participants were still less likely to choose the image on the side with the nasty subliminal image.
This was all pretty kosher, and statistically significant, and I wasn’t very interested, for the same reasons you weren’t. If humans really could see the future, we’d probably know about it already; and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather than one-off findings. There’s plenty of amazing stuff in our infinitely distracting universe and I’ll pay attention to the cheesy precognition stuff when the evidence is good and replicated.
Now the study has been replicated. Three academics – Stuart Richie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman – have re-run three of these backwards experiments, just as Bem ran them, and found no evidence of precognition. They submitted their negative results to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which published Bem’s paper last year, and the journal rejected their paper out of hand. We never, they explained, publish studies that replicate other work.
This squabble illustrates two problems facing all of science, which have never been adequately addressed.
The first is the problem of context: these positive results may have happened purely by chance, against a backdrop of negative results that never reached the light of day. Researchers and academic journals, just like newspaper journalists, are more likely to publish eye-catching positive results. We know that even if you analyse one study’s results in lots of different ways, you increase the likelihood of getting a positive finding purely by chance. So replicating these findings was key – Bem himself said so in his paper – and keeping track of the negative replications is vital too. For clinical trials, there is a system of registering your trial before you recruit participants, to reduce the risk of negative results being buried (it’s imperfect, as I’ve written, but it exists). Outside of trials, people tend not to bother, which puts whole fields at risk of spurious positive findings: Wiseman has set up a register for people to declare that they were attempting to replicate Bem’s work.
But the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said: “Your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published.”)
The New York Times ran a long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist covered it twice, the Guardian joined in online, and the Telegraph wrote about it three times over. It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new, negative findings now emerging, in the same way that newspapers often fail to return to a debunked scare. The most interesting problems around information today are about how to cope with the overload. For some eye-catching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.
This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday 23 April 2011.
From SEEDMAGAZINE.COM World Wide Mind by Michael Chorost
April 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
By making the internet a new nervous system for humanity, humans will also re-connect with one another in a profoundly new way.
When my BlackBerry died I took it to a cell phone store in San Francisco’s Mission district. I handed it over to the clerk the way I would give my cat Elvis to the vet.
“JVM 523,” I said mournfully. When I’d woken up the screen was blank but for that cryptic error message.
The clerk called tech support while I wandered around the store,peering at cell phone covers and batteries. He beckoned me over ten minutes later.
“It’s dead,” he said.
“You can’t just reload the operating system?”
“They say not.”
“How can a software bug kill a BlackBerry?” I said. “It’s just code.”
He shrugged. He hadn’t been hired for his ability to answer philosophical questions. But, he told me, for fifty bucks they could send me a new one overnight.
“All right,” I said, and walked out, minus BlackBerry.
The stores were full of avocados and plantains, $15 knapsacks hanging from awnings, and rows of watches in grimy windows. Crinkly-faced women pushed kids in strollers and grabbed their hands to keep them from pulling no-brand socks out of cardboard boxes. The world, whole and complete.
Except for my email, and the Internet. Just me and my lone self-contained body. I missed my BlackBerry’s email, of course, but what I missed just as much was having the planet’s information trove at my fingertips. I couldn’t summon Google on the street and ask it questions. How high is this hill I’m climbing? What do the critics say about this movie? Where can I find camping equipment on Market Street? When is the next bus coming?
Most of all, I couldn’t ask it, “Who is this person?”
I had asked it that question a few months earlier while visiting Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C. I wanted to see how American Sign Language dealt with fractions and cosines. So I was taken to visit a math class.
The professor was blond and flamingo-slender, with a snub nose. She spoke with the distinctive lisp of a high-frequency hearing loss. It was a warm spring day, with breezes tumbling in through an open window. I soon saw how fractions were done. She signed the numerator using a one-handed code for the numbers 1 through 9, dropped her hand an inch, then signed the denominator. As she discussed slopes, she gestured them in midair in a lovely hand jive of math and motion.
The class handout gave me her name: Regina Nuzzo. I unholstered my BlackBerry, held it under the desk at an angle, called up Google, and stealthily typed her name into it. I scrolled down the results with the thumbwheel. Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford. Postdoc at McGill, on analyzing fMRI data. Progressive hearing loss. And she was a science writer, too. She had just done a story on hybrid cochlear implants. When I looked up she was sweeping her left hand in an arc, taking in all the students, tapping her thumb and index finger together. It was the ASL “do” sign, meaning, in combination with her tilted head and quizzical expression, “What shall we do now? What’s next?”
Now I knew her background, her history, her interests. It gave her depth, dimension, a local habitation, and a name. I looked at her, thinking: Wow, a deaf science writer. Just like me.
Nosy? Invasive? Perhaps just a little. But I was a visitor from the other side of the country. Knowing something about her would help me smooth my way into a conversation. Anyway, I figured the day was coming when it would be considered rude not to Google someone upon meeting them. One could discover mutual interests so much more quickly that way.
I went up to her after class to ask her about the complexities of teaching math in American Sign Language. It was easy to steer the conversation to our mutual interest in writing. Our conversation began that day, both by email and in person, and it has never stopped.
But when I was standing in the Mission District amidst the ruckus of faded awnings and shouting children, all that was in the past. I missed my BlackBerry. I kept reaching for the holster, expecting to feel the device’s rounded plastic edges and their slight warmth from my body. Forget your Blackberry, I told myself. Look about you. Pay attention to the sights and smells of the world.
I walked about, nosed into stores, and ate lunch at my favorite taqueria. But it troubled me how separate the two worlds of my experience were. My BlackBerry offered me an infinite supply of information and messages. The material world offered me infinite sensation and variety, and the faces and voices of my friends. It seemed altogether wrong that each world could be experienced only by excluding the other. Surely, I thought, there must be a way to bring them together.
THE PUSH-PULL DYNAMIC OF EVOLUTION
What’s among the top three most desired gifts for single men and women? A quality introduction to a prospective date. In fact, in recent research commissioned by Engage, the chance to meet someone special was more desired than a PlayStation, Xbox, or iPod.
—From a spam ad for an online dating website, sent December 20, 2006.
In 2006 a spam email informed me that among single men and women, “the chance to meet someone special” just barely beat out the PlayStation, the Xbox, and the iPod. It was ridiculous enough to make me laugh out loud. But on reflection I decided that from the way people looked raptly at their screens and caressed their little keyboards, maybe it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounded. I loved my BlackBerry. If someone had offered to implant it in me so I could skip the thumb scrolling and typing, I would have said, “Tell me more.”
I am already accustomed to implanted computers, because I have two. I am deaf and have a cochlear implant in each ear. Deafness is often caused by the loss of tiny filaments (called hair cells) in the inner ear. In a normal ear these filaments vibrate in response to sound and trigger the auditory nerves. I lost many of my hair cells before birth because my mother had had rubella, but I had enough hearing left to be able to use hearing aids. However, in 2001 my one good ear died completely. It happened in about four hours. No one knows why.
My cochlear implant substitutes for the lost hair cells by directly triggering the auditory nerves with implanted electrodes. A surgeon drilled an inch and a half into my skull, countersunk a ceramic-encased microchip behind my left ear, and threaded sixteen electrodes into my inner ear. Now an external device sitting on my ear picks up sound, digitizes it, and radios a stream of 1s and 0s through my skin to the microchip. The chip receives the radio signal with a tiny antenna and decides how to strobe the electrodes on and off. By choosing which electrodes to fire at any given moment, it makes my auditory nerves transmit sound information to my brain.
Even though I have 280,000 transistors in my skull, more than in the CPU of my computer when I started grad school, they can’t reproduce the functioning of a normal ear in all its subtlety and range. In fact, they stimulate the auditory nerves in a way that is quite different than in a normal ear. Because of that, I had to learn how to hear all over again. Voices sounded like gibberish at first. It took me months to learn how to interpret the software’s representation of vowels and consonants as English.
But I learned, and now I use radios and telephones easily again. My two implants make me irreversibly computational, a living example of the integration of humans and computers. So for me the thought of implanting something like a BlackBerry in my head is not so strange. It would not be so strange for a lot of people, I think. According to the New York Times, in 2009 the average teenage user sent or received 2,272 text messages per month. Assuming a sixteen-hour waking day, that’s 76 messages per day, five per hour. And that’s just an average. The article mentioned a girl who had sent or received 14,528 texts in a month, or 475 messages per day. If one hypothesizes that a relatively active user sends 4,000 texts per month, that’s 133 texts per day, or 8 per hour. Numbers
like that suggests a seamless, continuous flow of messages woven throughout the day. Teenagers will text on their devices inside knapsacks during class, during restaurant meals, even while driving. That’s dangerous and sometimes fatal, but the allure is so strong they cannot resist. And, of course, many adults behave the same way. This intense connectivity reveals a longing for fast, dense communication—one that current bodies and devices can only partly fulfill.
But few people, including me, would actually go to such measures simply to be able to text more efficiently. An implanted device would have to do much more than a BlackBerry. It would have to let people be effortlessly aware of what their friends and colleagues are doing. It would have to let them know what their friends are seeing and feeling, thus enabling much richer forms of communication. And people should be able to walk down the street savoring the richness of the world while also being aware, in the background of their minds, of the ceaseless hum of their friends’ ideas and experiences.
Such a human-machine integration is far beyond current technology, of course. But technology advances by integrating. That is, when one system improves, it spurs improvement in other systems so they can keep up. When those systems improve, they in turn spur the first system to improve. The systems become increasingly dependent on each other. Their futures become mutually bound.
Take, for example, desktop computers and the software that runs them. Better computers let software engineers write bigger programs. Bigger programs create a demand for better computers. The computer manufacturers are happy to oblige, and the cycle starts all over again. A push is matched by a pull, which evokes a new push. That push-pull dynamic has rammed innovation into overdrive. For example, it took between 1900 and 1990 to develop computers that could perform one million instructions per second (MIPS) per thousand dollars. In 2005, computer manufacturers added an additional MIPS per thousand dollars to their computers every five hours.
A push-pull dynamic is hobbled, though, when one system can’t improve as fast as the other. The Internet is improving very fast. The human body improves very slowly. Our hands evolved to grip spears and plows, and so can type only so many emails in a day. Our senses evolved to monitor a largely unchanging savannah for friends and predators, and so can pay attention to only a handful of events at a time. To be sure, some human attributes like IQ appear to have risen in the twentieth century, but the rate of increase is much slower than technology’s. There is no Moore’s Law for human beings.
This mismatch between humans and the Internet imposes inherent limits on how much either can improve. This is unfortunate, because they are a natural match for a push-pull dynamic driving each other upward. Their strengths are complementary. The Internet is fast, while humans are slow; capacious, while humans are forgetful. Conversely, humans are self-aware while the Internet isn’t, and humans can interact with the physical world while the Internet can’t. But they also have aligned strengths: they are both intensely networked, intensely communicative entities.
One way to overcome the separateness of humans and the Internet is to increase the speed and density of their information exchange. Nature has already solved an engineering challenge like this, in fact, in your own head. Your brain has two hemispheres, each of which controls the opposite side of your body. Your left hemisphere controls your right hand and the right side of your face, for instance. In a normal brain the two halves work together smoothly and efficiently because they are connected via the corpus callosum, a bundle of 200 to 250 million nerve fibers. Their separateness is overcome by what scientists call “massively parallel connectedness.”
But if a surgeon severs the corpus callosum, as has sometimes been done in last-ditch attempts to control epilepsy, it soon becomes clear that the two hemispheres have very different desires and intentions. One hand buttons a shirt while the other simultaneously unbuttons it. One hand pulls down one’s trousers, while the other pulls them back up. In his book The Bisected Brain Michael Gazzaniga wrote that splitting the hemispheres “produces two separate, but equal, cognitive systems each with its own abilities to learn, emote, think, and act.” In an intact brain the corpus callosum lets the hemispheres exchange so much data so quickly that functionally they behave as a unified brain. The rapidity and density of the connection effectively erases their differences.
But imagine that the two hemispheres were only weakly connected—by email, say. Then they could only send messages like this back and forth:
From: Left motor cortex
To: Right motor cortex
Subject: Help me open this jar
Importance: High
Dear Right motor cortex,
At 14:32:47.2 I gripped the peanut butter jar. Could you please grip the top and twist it to the right by 14.32:47.3? Please let me know how hard you start twisting, and I will email you back with how much I am tightening the grip. If the lid does not move, let’s talk to the forebrain for additional strategic planning. I look forward to working with you on this.
Thanks,
Left motor cortex
Without a corpus callosum, the right and left halves of the brain would feel like, and be, separate entities. For any kind of unified consciousness to emerge from disparate parts, it needs fast and massively parallel communication. This is exactly what humans and the Internet lack. We are Paleolithics poking away at Pentiums. But what if we built an electronic corpus callosum to bind us together? What if we eliminated the interface problem—the slow keyboards, the sore fingers, the tiny screens, the clumsiness of point-and-click—by directly linking the Internet to the human brain? It would become seamlessly part of us, as natural and simple to use as our own hands.
The history of life on Earth shows that when new needs arise, evolution accommodates them by creating new structures. In the primeval Earth, single-celled creatures joined up to become multicelled ones, surrendering independence in exchange for collective power. CO2-breathing plants cooperated with O2-breathing animals to create a new biosphere in which each could evolve all the faster. Predators invented better ways to hunt, so prey invented better defenses, which forced predators to innovate yet again. When humans appeared the process picked up speed, with each cycle taking place in centuries rather than millennia. Plows led to better harvests, which gave people leisure time to invent better plows. Telegraphs let newspapers go national, which created a demand for better journalistic tools such as teletypewriters. New computer chips let electrical engineers create even faster chips. Each push triggers a pull, which sets the stage for another push.
This is the way evolution works. Increases in complexity and power are not accidental; they are automatic. Systems ratchet each other up in push-pull cycles, driving each other to higher levels of complexity and scope. We see this push-pull dynamic in so many contexts that some scientists argue there must be fundamental laws of nature, akin to those of thermodynamics, driving ecosystems to higher and higher levels of order. Progress via a push-pull dynamic appears to be woven into the very structure of life. In today’s world, the strongest push-pull dynamic in existence is the synergy between human beings and the Internet. The Internet constantly produces new tools—such as email, blogging, texting, YouTube, Twitter, the Kindle, and the iPad. People use them to amplify their powers by socializing and publishing in new ways. Money flows to developers, and even more tools are invented. Overdrive? More like strapping a rocket onto a sled careening downhill.
But as I said, the lack of a fast and efficient interface sets inherent limits on how much humans can do with the Internet. If human minds could work directly with the Internet, two grand unifications would happen at once. First, humans would become more closely connected with each other. As I will explain later in the book, we would have entirely new ways to sense each other’s presence, moods, and needs. A person with a suitably wired brain could be aware of other people as if they were part of her own body, the same way she knows where her own fingers are. Second, humanity and its tool, the Internet, would become a single organism with entirely new powers. Not just a mere hybrid, but a new species in its own right.
To be sure, the Internet is a human invention reflecting human choices and values. However, it often looks as if it is a separate species with an internal logic of its own. The 1987 stock market crash has been blamed on program trading—computers that started selling frantically because every other computer was selling. The ceaseless war between viruses and antivirus programs looks eerily like the workings of a biological ecosystem. However, even if one posits that the Internet is comparable to a biological species, it’s obvious that it’s not very intelligent. It has primitive ways of “sensing” and “reacting,” but it has no self-awareness and no ability to formulate its own goals. Nor, as I argue later, could it ever reach such a state on its own. It could, however, be the backbone of a sophisticated
new organism if physically integrated with humanity. The Internet would become a new nervous system for humanity, and humanity would become a new body and executive brain for the Internet.
Such a physical integration can now be discussed in a scientifically grounded way. It’s like the way Jules Verne, in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, imagined launching a spaceship by firing it out of an enormous cannon. Verne underestimated the future development of rocketry, but he had the physics right. He explained the concept of escape velocity and correctly identified southern Florida as the best spot in the United States for launching a spacecraft. (Florida’s nearness to the equator gives any projectile additional velocity as long as it is launched eastward.) He correctly explained that such a spacecraft must slow down as it leaves Earth and speed up as it nears the Moon, and got the duration of the voyage almost right, predicting four days (the Apollo astronauts did
it in a little over three.) Because it was grounded in real science, Verne’s novel was conceptually plausible. In the same way, recent advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology make it possible to write a conceptually plausible account of how brains could be “read” and linked together. This book is grounded in science now going on in labs around the world, and draws on technology that is already in use in human beings. This book is, in other words, a thought experiment. In terms of technology, here is what it covers.
• It discusses existing technologies for detecting brain activity and the algorithms used to interpret the resulting data. I cover them in order of increasing sophistication. But none of these algorithms, I point out, can yet understand the brain’s lived experience
of the world.
• It presents two emerging mechanisms for reading and writing brain activity, specifically, nanowires and optogenetics. Mechanisms are crucial, since without them nothing else is feasible. If you need to be convinced that they now exist before going along
with the thought experiment of this book, then I suggest you read Chapter 8 first.
• It outlines a communications protocol for sending perceptions and memories from one brain to another. While the neural machinery of mental activity differs from one brain to another, high-level concepts and relationships are brain-independent. We share them through language and common experience. A suitable protocol could transmit those concepts and relationships in code, with implanted computers managing the specifics of each person’s neural wiring.
• It presents examples of the new kinds of collective communication that the physical interlinking of humans with the Internet would allow. I describe new activities such as telempathy, synthetic perception, synthetic memory, and dream brainstorming.
• It offers an account of how a collective mind might emerge out of these collective interactions. Such an entity—some call it a hive mind—would be, by definition, inaccessible to any individual, just as the collective action of an ant colony is beyond the imagination of an individual ant. We might know, however, that something new had come into existence, and I discuss what the clues to that might look like.
Along the way I debunk common assumptions about “mind reading” fed by science fiction. It will never be possible to experience the world exactly the way another brain does. It will never be possible to achieve perfect, unambiguous communication. It will never be possible to do away with language. What I propose are new kinds of communication, which like every previous kind will present new possibilities and new risks.
I also aim to imagine how to sustain the life-affirming properties of human contact and community in the face of such powerful and addictive technologies. They will not improve the quality of human life if they only bury people even further into their electronic shells. Practically every week some magazine runs a story about how email, cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., have diminished the quality of face-to-face communication. In 2009 the New York Times profiled a family of six in which every member, including the five-year old, starts the day by grabbing a nearby electronic gadget instead of talking to each other. There is nothing new about the fear that technology is harming human interaction. People philosophized and worried about telegraphs and telephones in very much the same way that people now philosophize and worry about the Internet. In an 1880 novel titled Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes two telegraph operators carried on a very politely Victorian version of cybersex and pondered whether they had a “real” relationship. Going back even further, Plato fretted about the impact of writing on human interaction 2,400 years ago in the Phaedrus. (To see that writing is a technology, consider what it would take for you to create a pen, ink, and paper on your own.) Plato argued that unlike its author, a written text could not engage in conversation; if questioned it would simply give the same answer again. Knowledge only truly exists in human interaction, he said. He concluded that by seducing people into believing that they can obtain knowledge from solitary reading, the written word threatens human ties.
The debate about technology’s effects on social interaction has been around for so long that it is essentially technology-independent. I see it as being about the tension between conflicting desires for autonomy and community. On the one hand we want to be autonomous, and seek space and privacy. On the other hand we want to be known and loved, and seek intimacy and community. These desires are in constant conflict. By constantly introducing new ways to be alone and together, technology keeps renewing the conflict. The conflict endures through the millennia; only the specific technologies change.
Rather than try to resolve the conflict, I want to transcend it by introducing a new perspective. For our two hemispheres, the distinction between autonomy and unity is meaningless because fast communication makes them effectively a single entity. In a similar way, the direct connection of brains to each other would transform the very terms of the debate. We would have to rethink what it means to be an individual and what it means to be part of a community. What would happen if we had the emotional equivalent of Twitter in our heads every waking moment? What if we could communicate nonverbally with people while dreaming? Bizarre-sounding ideas, to be sure, but exchanging 133 or more written messages in one day would have sounded equally bizarre just a few years ago. Teenagers’ conceptions of communication and community are already very different from their parents’.
If humans and machines become integrated in ways that let people
communicate collectively, it would trigger a vast reconfiguration in how
people define personal boundaries. Such a reconfiguration is already
under way, in fact, with many people revealing deeply personal information
on Facebook and Twitter. As New York magazine put it, “More
young people are putting more personal information out in public
than any older person ever would . . . In essence, every young person in
America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure.”
Similarly, notions of identity and selfhood are changing. Psychologists
worry that nonstop texting makes it harder for teenagers to define
themselves as autonomous individuals, since they are constantly
engaged with messages at the cost of exploring their own selves. But I
argue that what is really happening is a redefinition of selfhood rather
than its simple diminution. In the 1950s the philosopher Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin suggested that individuality would be enhanced, not weakened,
by collective communication. Later in this book I discuss his ideas
in detail.
Still, writing dozens if not hundreds of messages per day cannot
help but take away time from introspection, conversation, and the intimacy
of personal connection. Physical presence and touch are crucial
to development and health, and we ignore them at our peril. Even with
interlinked brains we would still be mammals with mammalian instincts
and needs. I argue that uniting technology with the body would address
some of the problems that bedevil us now, such as incessant distraction
and near-addiction to a flood of incoming messages. And if done right,
connecting the human body directly to the Internet would make online
communication as personal as face-to-face communication. Counterintuitively,
it will become possible to combine electronic connection with
physical presence, making them complement each other. Today, online
technologies are “dis-enchanting”; they pull people apart. Tomorrow,
they could be “enchanting” in that they pull people together.
Enchantment is a special and rare experience. When one is “enchanted”
with someone, one becomes fully aware of his spark, his personhood, his
uniqueness, his physicality. One does not experience the dissociation and
abstraction so often created by today’s electronic technologies. But when
enchantment happens in today’s world, it is usually only a one-on-one
experience. One is spellbound by a lecturer, infatuated with a lover, in harmony
with a co-worker. Collective enchantment, on the other hand, has
become relatively rare. In collective enchantment, one feels in harmony
with a group. Not overpowered by it, as in mobs or fascistic rallies, but
acutely attuned to it and contributing to it. This is what happens in the
dance, the symphony, the team collaboration. It does not happen online,
because that is precisely where the body disappears. But if the body could
be integrated with the Internet, in such a way that one feels what others
feel and sees what others see, then the possibility of collective enchantment
returns. And enchantment in a richer, deeper way, and on a larger
scale, than has ever been possible before.
But that kind of physical and electronic connection is going to require
a profound readjustment of the boundaries of privacy. How much of
ourselves we are willing to show, and how much of each other are we
willing to see? I am going to suggest that in order to make intimate electronic
communication work, we will have to teach people how to do it.
Deliberately, systematically, mindfully.
I was bereft when my BlackBerry died. It impressed on me how separate
the Internet is from the human body, and how much I felt that separation
when I lost access to it. So in this book I talk about overcoming
that separateness from the world of information. But my BlackBerry’s
demise also made me think hard about my reduction of face-to-face
connection with other human beings. So I tell a parallel, personal story
about intimacy. I rediscovered how to become enchanted with people. I
went to communication workshops in northern California, which were
resolutely and radically nontechnological. I moved to Gallaudet for a
year to learn American Sign Language in an effort to connect with other
deaf people in a language purely of the body, and also to get to know
Regina better. While this book is about connecting people via technology,
it is also a romance about friends, about a woman, and about what
humanity can become.
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This feature was excerpted from Michael Chorost’s new book World Wide Mind, which was released nationwide in February.
- Visit Michael’s website.
- Buy the book.
About the Author:
Michael Chorost is a technology theorist with an unusual perspective: his body is the future. In 2001 he went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to let him hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, in which he wrote about how mastering his new ear, a cochlear implant, enabled him to enhance his creative potential as a human being. Dr. Chorost earned his B.A. at Brown University and studied computer programming, Renaissance drama, and cultural theory on the way to his Ph.D. at UT-Austin. He doesn’t draw sharp lines between programming, science, writing, and art; to him, these are all profoundly creative human endeavors. (Read more.)
