The NeuroGeneration and Humankind’s Quest to Enhance the Brain

Some peo­ple may be uneasy with the idea of “brain enhance­ment,” but the quest to boost our brain­pow­er is noth­ing new; it is an essen­tial part of human nature. Ever since Homo sapi­ens emerged near­ly 200,000 years ago, we have been search­ing for ways to upgrade the hard­ware and wet­ware in our heads, and we’ve been cre­at­ing and using tools to help us do it—physical and cog­ni­tive tools that help us solve prob­lems and com­plete tasks more effi­cient­ly, tools that extend our nat­ur­al abil­i­ties and allow us to do things that weren’t pos­si­ble before. Lan­guage, num­bers, sci­ence, education—these are all tools we’ve devel­oped to improve our men­tal capacities.

Our most pow­er­ful tool for nav­i­gat­ing the ever-chang­ing world, how­ev­er, is the brain itself. It took bil­lions of years for mod­ern humans to arrive on earth, and although we con­tin­ue to evolve genet­i­cal­ly, this process occurs at a painstak­ing­ly slow pace. Our brain is nature’s way of allow­ing us to adapt more quick­ly than we evolve. It’s the cog­ni­tive machin­ery that lets us cre­ate and cope with the mod­ern world.

This most vital asset is also the seat of the self and the cen­ter of our per­son­al uni­verse. Every­thing we see, hear, and smell is a prod­uct of our brain, which fil­ters the data gath­ered by our sens­es and con­verts it into the mod­el of real­i­ty we expe­ri­ence. And yet we still know sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle about the organ that is respon­si­ble for our human con­di­tion. Cour­tesy of recent advances in imag­ing tools, how­ev­er, we’ve begun to unlock some of the secrets of the human brain. And of every­thing we have learned so far, the thing I find most amaz­ing is that it is built to change. Our human brain is three pounds of pure potential.

For cen­turies, most doc­tors and sci­en­tists believed that the brain was a fixed enti­ty. Longheld the­o­ries claimed that once you reached adult­hood, the neu­rons, synaps­es, grey mat­ter, and white mat­ter in your skull could not be changed. Correction—it could change, but only in one way: for the worse. Injury could dam­age your brain, and recov­ery was thought to be impos­si­ble. Old age could lead to the death of neu­rons, which could nev­er be replaced. If you had a men­tal health con­di­tion, you were stuck with it for the rest of your life.

For­tu­nate­ly, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sci­ence of neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty has debunked these notions. The med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties now under­stand that the brain is in a con­stant state of change, a dynam­ic enti­ty that has the abil­i­ty to rewire, repro­gram, and heal itself. The brain’s neu­rons, like trees in a rain­for­est, can sprout limbs that con­nect to oth­er neu­rons in new ways to alter the neur­al net­works inside our heads. Our brains change not only in response to the world around us, but are also con­stant­ly rewiring in response to how we use them. Activ­i­ties that are fre­quent­ly repeat­ed are rein­forced by the for­ma­tion of addi­tion­al neur­al path­ways to sup­port those activ­i­ties. Neur­al path­ways that are used often are strength­ened, but if a neu­ron isn’t “fired and wired”—used with­in the network—it can become weak­ened or even die off. This means that far from our brains con­trol­ling us, we can con­trol our brains. The trans­for­ma­tive dis­cov­ery that our thoughts, actions, and envi­ron­ment can impact how our brains are wired is what opened the door to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to inten­tion­al­ly shape them.

Despite all that we have gleaned so far, sev­er­al things lim­it what we know about the enig­ma between our ears:

Dead brains don’t talk. Much of what we have learned about the brain comes from dis­sect­ing those of deceased peo­ple. Jacopo Annese, an expert neu­roanatomist at UCSD, has been dis­sect­ing and slic­ing brains since 1994. In 2009, about 400,000 peo­ple around the globe tuned in to watch Annese make 2,401 slices in the brain of famed amne­sia patient “H.M.” Although the slices pro­vid­ed a new look at neu­ronal archi­tec­ture, it was still dead tis­sue. It’s like look­ing at a flat map of a city. It depicts where the roads lead and where the build­ings are locat­ed, but it doesn’t reveal what the peo­ple are doing inside those build­ings, how they com­mu­ni­cate and work with each oth­er, or why they do what they do. That is the great mys­tery we are still try­ing to solve.

Pic­tures don’t tell the whole sto­ry. As humans, we are inher­ent­ly attract­ed to images. About 30 per­cent of the brain’s neu­rons are ded­i­cat­ed to vision, com­pared to just 8 per­cent for touch and a mere 3 per­cent for hear­ing. This helps explain why, in our quest to under­stand the brain, we have looked to pic­tures to tell the sto­ry. Per­haps the first brain imag­ing tool, the micro­scope was invent­ed in the 1590s, offer­ing a way to view brain tis­sue at high mag­ni­fi­ca­tion. Since then, brain imag­ing has come a long way with MRI, PET, CT, and SPECT, and mod­ern­day imag­ing tools such as func­tion­al MRI (fMRI) that attempt to map brain activ­i­ty now pro­vide clues as to where things hap­pen and when they hap­pen. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly tell us why they hap­pen. With­out the “why,” we can’t decode the dynam­ics of the brain’s behav­ior. And with a sys­tem like the brain, which is con­stant­ly evolv­ing, it’s the dynam­ics that hold the answers to many of the ques­tions we have.

No two brains are alike. The folds of the human cere­bral cor­tex are as indi­vid­ual as a fin­ger­print. This means that with 7.5 bil­lion peo­ple on earth, there are 7.5 bil­lion unique brains. The vast major­i­ty of brain research to date, how­ev­er, has focused on edu­cat­ed males from the West­ern world. Females remain under­rep­re­sent­ed in both human and ani­mal tri­als. A 2017 review in eNeu­ro revealed that brain tri­als using only male ani­mals out­paced female-only stud­ies at a rate of 6.7 to one. Exist­ing neu­ro­science research has also vir­tu­al­ly ignored peo­ple in areas such as Africa, South Amer­i­ca, and Asia.

As dra­mat­ic as the devel­op­ments of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry were, what is to come in this century—even in just the next few decades—will be still more astound­ing. Our under­stand­ing of our lim­i­ta­tions will be shat­tered as we explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties that arise when we bring minds, machines, and the mate­r­i­al world togeth­er. While this inte­gra­tion will take many forms, what is most excit­ing to me is the way in which it allows us to expand the vast poten­tial of the human brain. Thanks to more pow­er­ful tools, we are on the brink of unrav­el­ing the brain’s secrets—and using them to our advantage.

In the Neu­ro­Gen­er­a­tion, we will have a much more inti­mate rela­tion­ship with our neu­rons and synaps­es, under­stand­ing how they work and inten­tion­al­ly direct­ing their activ­i­ty to improve atten­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and more. Enhanc­ing and aug­ment­ing our brain­pow­er in these ways will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we learn, the way we do busi­ness, and the way we heal disease.

– This is an adapt­ed excerpt from the new book The Neu­ro­Gen­er­a­tion: The New Era in Brain Enhance­ment That Is Rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the Way We Think, Work, and Heal (Ben­Bel­la Books, 2020) by neu­rotech pio­neer Tan Le. An inven­tor, explor­er, and entre­pre­neur, Tan is the founder and CEO of EMOTIV, a San Fran­cis­co-head­quar­tered neu­roin­for­mat­ics com­pa­ny on a mis­sion to improve under­stand­ing of the human brain and to devel­op a plat­form for research and innovation.