The Down Side To Having Your Brain Connected to the Internet
Colin Wilson’s “The Mind Parasites,” a sci-fi thriller about mind control, couldn’t be more true-to-life, now that scientists have successfully established a data exchange between the human brain and the Internet.
Scientists from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa have successfully streamed human brain waves to the Internet using an electroencephalograph and a mini computer, Raspberry Pi, according to Vice News.
It quoted university lecturer Adam Pantanowitz, who is also head of the Brainternet research group, as saying that information can “travel” from our brains to the web and vice versa.
However, he expressed concern about the ethical side of developments that will allow brains to be connected to the Internet in the same way as household devices. Such connections may make our very thoughts an easy target for hackers, according to him.
The scientist believes that the danger that intruders could hack and control people’s minds will become real when engineers learn to not just transfer, but download information from the network to the human brain.
With the experiments within the Brainternet project still at an early stage, Pantanowitz has proposed solving some security problems well in advance.
He called for the creation a new independent network for Brainternet, such as a quantum network, which will be protected from intrusions.
“If someone starts hacking or faking information in the middle of the connection, then the whole nature of such a network is changing to warn about the attack,” he said.
In 2014, a study published in Frontiers of Neuroengineering pointed to possible threats related to the expansion of the human brain’s capabilities through connection to the Internet.
Stressing the significance of “the right to neural privacy,” the survey claimed that in the future, Internet intruders will be reoriented to hacking consciousness rather than computers.
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