By Christopher Mims
You might've heard that Facebook Inc. is working on a way for
you to message your friends and update your news
feed...telepathically.
When the company announced this at its annual F8 conference in
mid-April, it was pretty vague about how the feat would be
accomplished. Turns out the plan includes building a technology
that would, by itself, revolutionize how we study the human
brain.
Are the methods crazy? Yes. Do neuroscientists and engineers
outside Facebook express extreme doubt this will succeed? Yes.
Facebook doesn't care and is investing millions in research that
could produce a consumer gadget.
After I spoke with project members, based at Facebook's
mysterious Building 8 incubator for moonshots, it became clear that
the company's larger goal is to make a handful of long-term bets on
technologies that could define the next era of computing.
When your face is stuck inside a VR headset or you're out
walking around wearing a pair of augmented-reality glasses, you
can't exactly reach for a keyboard or mouse, says Mark Chevillet, a
physicist and neuroscientist who is Facebook's technical lead on
the as-yet-unnamed project.
The initiative would give Facebook a way to control those
systems hands-free. Messaging is just the beginning. Facebook isn't
working on a brain implant -- though other Silicon Valley giants
are. The answer could ultimately be as simple as a headband.
To pull it off, Facebook has enlisted a small in-house team,
supplemented by 60 scientists and engineers from research
institutions across the U.S., all receiving funding from Facebook.
Their goal is to update an obscure, largely abandoned technology
known as "fast optical scattering," aka "event-related optical
signal." Basically, you shine a light through the head and into the
brain, then measure the light reflected back.
It sounds bonkers, but in one way or another, scientists have
been using light to peer into the body for nearly a century.
When this technique is used on lab animals, their brains are
exposed and researchers can directly observe brain cells expanding
and contracting as they fire. The challenge for Dr. Chevillet's
team is to accomplish the same thing in intact humans, when there's
a layer of skull, skin and hair in the way. It's a problem that to
date has been impossible to surmount.
If you've ever pressed a flashlight into your hand and seen it
glow, you know how light can make its way through human flesh.
Facebook's researchers think they have a chance of success because
they're developing sensors to identify the small number of photons
that, after penetrating the skull and bouncing off a neuron, return
to the detector instead of scattering in every direction.
Sensor technology that could in theory accomplish this --
developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory and funded almost exclusively by the U.S. Department of
Defense -- has to date benefited things like sonars, space
exploration and observing the ground from the air through dense
foliage. Thus far, the technology hasn't been pressed against
anyone's head.
Krishna Shenoy, a pioneering neuroprosthetics researcher at
Stanford University, says if there's any evidence Facebook's team
could sense brain activity from outside the skull nearly as
accurately as with implants, he hasn't seen it. Dr. Shenoy and his
team have experimented with having humans type eight words a minute
by moving a cursor on a virtual keyboard through thought alone --
but even that required a brain implant.
And repurposing U.S. military technology to observe the
machinery of thought is only half of the Facebook research team's
problem. The other challenge is transforming brain readings into
actual words.
Alexander Huth, of the University of California, Berkeley, isn't
connected to Facebook's project but has been working on how brains
process language for eight years. His research revealed that words
-- and the concepts that underlie them -- are spread across the
surface of our brains. By observing which parts of a brain are
active, you might be able to determine the word, or at least
concept, that someone is thinking.
Dr. Huth argues that the greatest challenge in "reading" minds
is that we still know so little about how language works.
At Building 8, they're approaching this in a quintessentially
Facebook way: by throwing artificial intelligence at it. Dr.
Chevillet says that if he and his team can get enough data from the
right parts of the brain, they could train a machine-learning
algorithm that correlates neural activity with language to extract
words from our heads. The method would be similar to how scientists
train computers to understand spoken language.
I explained Facebook's plan to Richard Barbour, managing vice
president of NIRx Medical Technologies, a pioneer of a related (but
distinct) light-based brain-imaging tech used in laboratories all
over the world. His response was a long pause.
"I'm not saying it's impossible," he says, "but it wouldn't be
my approach."
As risky as all this sounds, Facebook isn't just shooting in the
dark. The research program at Building 8 is managed by Regina
Dugan, who comes from the DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency by way of Google. The sizable project budgets come with
strict two-year deadlines. Still, none of the tech giants who hire
academics to research topics in their skunkworks have, to date,
yielded much in the way of out-of-the-box breakthroughs.
"We accept that this problem is high risk, high reward," says
Dr. Chevillet.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 11, 2017 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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