On a recent afternoon in the minimalist headquarters of the M.I.T. Media Lab, the research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna handed me a pair of thick gray eyeglasses to try on. They looked almost ordinary aside from the three silver strips on their interior, each one outfitted with an array of electrical sensors. She placed a small robotic soccer ball on the table before us and suggested that I do some “basic mental calculus.” I started running through multiples of 17 in my head.
After a few seconds, the soccer ball lit up and spun around. I seemed to have made it move with the sheer force of my mind, though I had not willed it in any sense. My brain activity was connected to a foreign object.
“Focus, focus,” Kosmyna said. The ball swirled around again. “Nice,” she said. “You will get better.”
Kosmyna, who is also a visiting research scientist at Google, designed the glasses herself. They are, in fact, a simple brain-computer interface, or B.C.I., a conduit between mind and machine. As my mind went from 17 to 34 to 51, electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) sensors picked up heightened electrical activity in my eyes and brain. The ball had been programmed to light up and rotate whenever my level of neural “effort” reached a certain threshold. When my attention waned, the soccer ball stood still.
For now, the glasses are solely for research purposes. At M.I.T., Kosmyna has used them to help patients with A.L.S. communicate with caregivers — but she said she receives multiple purchase requests a week. So far she has declined them. She’s too aware that they could easily be misused.
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