Facebook wants you to post comments from your brain — no fingers required

By Gary Elinoff, contributing writer  

Facebook is working on a new project that’s pretty far out, even for them. The stated aim is to empower you to type directly from your brain — no fingers or any other body parts involved, nor any pesky brain implants, but the implications go farther than that, to nothing less than a universal language translator.

To like or not to like?

The project is being spearheaded by none other than Regina Dugan, head of R&D at Facebook’s famed Building F8 team and former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Not to be outdone by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, America’s favorite mad scientist, is working on a similar brain-scan project at his Neuralink division, but that’s a tale for another blog.

So yes, everyone, this is real! But don’t hold your breath because even Facebook doesn’t claim that the brain-typing technology will be available at eBay, Amazon, or your local electronics store any time soon.

As usual with Facebook announcements, there is plenty of hype, but the details are scarce. However, according to Dugan, as noted in a Facebook post (of course) and in PCWorld, “Over the next two years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm by decoding neural activity devoted to speech.”

Portable optical imaging machine?

No, the project doesn’t involve building a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine cheap enough, safe enough, and small enough for use by the general public, so Siemens and General Electric can rest easy. According to Dugan, the key technology will be optical imaging, a diagnostic technique that is already used in brain research and is routinely used in prenatal medicine. Unlike X-rays and NMR, it is considered to be harmless to the human body.

As quoted in a recent article in phys.org, Dugan said, “We are not talking about decoding your random thoughts; that is more than many of us want to know,” and further stated that, “We are talking about thoughts you want to share. Words you have decided to send to the speech center of the brain.” So there you have it: You’ll be able to tell the world all about the latest exploits of your cat or your three-year-old and not have to worry about inadvertently revealing any of your deepest, darkest secrets.

Concepts and thoughts instantly translated

All joking aside, being able to “type” without any physical movement and without having probes attached to the most fragile innards of the human body will be an awesome, transformative achievement in and of itself. But there is more, much more.

Dugan went on to describe that the project “would also have the potential to capture concepts and semantics associated with words people are thinking, making language differences irrelevant by enabling sharing of what is in mind.”

As Dugan puts it, our brains don’t think in text. When you think of an item such as a “cup,” your brain is thinking of the object and the idea and not “C-U-P.” Indeed, “One day, not so far away, it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and for you to feel it instantly in Spanish,” as Dugan is quoted in Bloomberg.

This idea is so awesome that it’s scary — nothing less than a Rosetta Stone tuned directly to the user’s brain itself.