Typing Telepathically

Few months ago Facebook announced its plan to bring brain computer interfacing to the average consumer. Facebook is not alone in this, Neuralink and Kernel also shares the same ambition. But this is the first time when such a project has been officially confirmed, which brought excitement as well as skepticism from the neuroscientists. Remember such interfaces are already being used by locked-in patients to communicate their thoughts. Facebook aims to ultimately merge the digital world online with the real world offline and the human mind. If communication by telepathy could be realized, the phenomenal amount of information the brain produces (1 terabyte per second) would be transmitted much more efficiently (speech achieves only 100 bytes per second). To achieve this Facebook is planning to capture all information the brain sends to our speech centres and relay it to the outside world. Facebook is emphasizing that this does not mean reading all thoughts but only the ones you choose to say. Initially Facebook is endeavoring to enable humans to click and type with their brain at a speed of 100 words per minute and ultimately they want to enable communication where one person thinks in a language and sends out the message by thought to a recipient’s skin, and the recipient is able to feel the message in an entirely different language. They want it to a tool for the people who cannot read or write but can think and feel. 

There have been previous attempts in building these technologies to accomplish things such as providing a cure for mental illness and enabling soldiers injured in the war to regain their memories. However Facebook's aim is a one which is ubiquitous and if achieved the current devices such as smartphone or wrist watch used for communicating on social media will no longer be needed as thought will suffice to connect the participants all the time.

Although, neuroscientists are questioning if the idea is practically possible. They believe that the types of brain scanners available, itself limit the technology. The best user-friendly scanner available is an EEG (electroencephalogram). Although EEG is useful if one wanted an overall picture of electrical activity in the brain, it does not possess the sensitivity to detect signals associated with specific thoughts. But for increased sensitivity you have to place the electrodes directly into the brain’s speech centers, the risk of infection is too tremendous. The skepticism arises because the announcement has been pretty vague about how Facebook is going to direct neural activity from optical techniques as state of the art is nowhere near that. Its really a challenging task for Facebook to get this highly detailed information non-invasively. And with Facebook which had unscrupulous past behavior lend weight to such concerns

Independent monitoring, and transparency around the building and testing of brain-interface technology needs to be incorporated by Facebook, if it wants skepticism around its proposal to abate. Facebook has started to work on it. It will set up an independent Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) panel to supervise the project. Although the skin-hearing research would be absent of these kinds of institutional review boards. As their is government bodies funding involved hence Facebook is already working with institutional review boards