Content Gazette - October 2019 - Cover2

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Ali H. Sayed | IEEE Signal Processing Society President | ali.sayed@epfl.ch

Losing Your Mind

magine sitting in a room where every
individual is able to read every other
individual's mind. Would you lose
your mind?
We are living in an age where many
of us have already surrendered our personal privacy to online interfaces either
knowingly or by deceptive means. As
technology continues to advance, we
are likely to lose even more of our personal space and identity, unless legislation
catches up to keep pace with the transformative changes around us. Nicholas
Carr, author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize
finalist The Shallows: What the Internet
Is Doing to Our Brains, went further by
claiming that the Internet is having detrimental effects on our brains and cognition. According to him, "We become,
neurologically, what we think," a fact that
is in line with studies in the cognitive
sciences showing that our thoughts can
change and rewire our brains, thus potentially altering or enhancing some of
their functions. Albert Einstein was perhaps perceptive of this cognitive norm
when he stated, "It is not that I am so
smart, it is just that I stay with problems longer."
The online world we live in is not only
altering the personal space around us but
is also having an effect on our inner selves.
And there is yet more to come! Today, we
are moving in new technological directions that can literally "take control" of

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2019.2918011
Date of publication: 9 September 2019

our minds and brains, whether for good
or bad, with machines that can read our
brain waves and infer our thoughts [1].
The technology is taking its first steps
but is rapidly building up strength. Many
valid ethical and legal ramifications
will arise in this domain, in addition to
questionable practices and applications.
One would expect that common sense
would prevail, although this can never
be taken for granted. To paraphrase Voltaire, sometimes "common sense is not
so common." I will not delve into these
issues here. My focus will be on the potential for scientific discoveries and
the role our signal processing discipline
can play in advancing knowledge.
The ancient Egyptians had little regard for the brain. During mummification, they would remove brain tissues
through the nostrils and discard them. We
have come a long way since then and now
recognize the power and central role of
not only the human brain, but also of the
human mind and our thought process.
One of the most promising and mysterious frontiers for engineering, life
sciences, and cognitive sciences is joining forces to explore the human brain
and mind. Eric Kandel, the 2000 Nobel
Laureate in Physiology from Columbia
University declared in his speech at the
Nobel Banquet [2] "The biology of the
mind will be as scientifically important
to this century as the biology of the gene
has been to the 20th century." Our signal processing discipline can help perfect the tools and sensors to make this
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focus a reality by helping probe the biological environment more thoroughly,
analyze massive brain data more closely, and develop inference tools to learn
and predict thought patterns, as well as
restore or augment neural functionality.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 1 billion
people suffer from neurological disorders [3]. These are disorders of the
nervous system including brain damage, spinal cord injury, epilepsy, paralysis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's
disease, multiple sclerosis, migraines, and
other related ailments. Neurotechnology
offers great potential to treat patients with
such disorders, help restore functionality, and permit healthy aging. Interest
and progress in the field will be driven
by several ongoing trends in technology
that open the way for new discoveries
and treatments.
On one hand, our increased ability to design and control miniaturized
devices, coupled with advances in sensing and nanotechnologies, is changing the way we probe and interact with
living cells. At the same time, progress
in invasive and noninvasive procedures,
coupled with advances in new materials
and wireless technologies, is allowing us
to monitor the biological environment
ever more closely and continually. Likewise, advances in powerful imaging modalities, coupled with computing power,
storage capabilities, and intelligent bioinstruments, are enabling the collection
and processing of larger amounts of

| September 2019 |

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OCTOBER 2019

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Content Gazette - October 2019

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