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[–] moderator99 ago  (edited ago)

I don't know how accurate she is about brain-computer interfacing. DARPA has been researching this for a while but I don't know if they could ever succeed. (I could be completely wrong since things have changed since I researched this topic years ago.)

The brain isn't like a computer that you can just input and extract information. Each of us has a unique neural structure (particularly the neocortex where memories are stored) that develops it's highly complex inter-connections over a lifetime through the experiences and knowledge we acquire, and is different to each of us by way of how we take information in and think about and respond to it internally. That means they would have to have an almost complete blueprint of the target's brain (particularly the neocortex), but many of our neural connections change over time as we accumulate knowledge and experience, change the way we think, etc. As we go through life, some neural connections are dropped from lack of use while others are created.

Also, the brain is very resilient against physical damage and electromagnetic interference, having evolved over millions of years under often extreme EM conditions (this is why we can easily withstand both man-made and natural EM pollution). So an electromagnetic signal used in brain-computer interfacing has little chance of working. Also, picking up brain signals is impossible from any distance beyond what's used in MEG machines, which require very close proximity of the receivers (an array of SQUIDS). So at best, from remote distances you could only send signals to the brain and not receive them. The closest they've come to reading brain signals and deciphering them is with the use of a helmet consisting of a large array of electrodes that the user wears, and it picks up the weak EEG signals that can then be interpreted using Fourier transforms to learn some very simple information about the wearer's thoughts. The EM signals that the brain produces are heavily dampened by the skull, so more accurate signals than EEG are very difficult, if not impossible.