At some point in 2019, the narrative shifted from social media to neuroscience. Facebook discreetly revealed it was funding research into brain-machine interfaces while it was still riding high on two billion users and quarterly earnings that made Wall Street genuinely ecstatic. Helping people with speech impairments communicate again was a noble enough stated goal. However, it was evident from reading between the lines of that announcement that something else was developing. After years of researching how the human brain reacts to likes, notifications, and endless scrolling, a company was now paying scientists to directly decode brain signals. Even then, it was difficult to ignore the implications.
Behavioral psychology was the operating manual, not just background reading, according to former engineers who worked in Facebook’s growth and engagement teams during that time. Speaking to a journalist colleague at a tech conference in San Francisco a few years ago, a former product engineer put it plainly and seemingly guilt-free: “We knew what a variable reward schedule did to people.” The same Skinner would be read by us. We simply didn’t discuss it internally in those terms. That isn’t a regretful confession. It’s more akin to a shrug.
The fact that science is now catching up to what those engineers created makes this more than just another tell-all from Silicon Valley. Personalized digital brain simulations, or “digital brain twins,” appear to be entering clinical practice more quickly than most people anticipated, according to research published this past spring by the University of Virginia.
These models create customized computational replicas of an individual’s brain activity using MRI scans, activity data, and connectivity mapping. According to researchers like brain network analysis pioneer Randy McIntosh, it involves “data collected from your brain and merging them back into making a digital replica of what your brain is actually doing.” It sounds like science fiction. It is becoming less and less.
Patients with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted on their brains prior to surgery participated in Facebook’s 2019 brain study, which was carried out at UC San Francisco. In 75% of cases, the algorithms that were trained on those patients were able to recognize the question that a person had been asked and, in 61% of cases, their selected response. It was framed by Professor Eddie Chang as a way to assist those who suffer from speech loss, and that application is truly significant. However, it’s hard to look at those figures without considering what a business with Facebook’s commercial interests might do in the future with that kind of large-scale decoding capability.
Whether Facebook’s brain research ever went beyond its declared humanitarian objectives is still up for debate. Nothing about the company’s aggressive push into augmented and virtual reality, its shift to Meta, or its ongoing investment in wearable neural interfaces indicates malice. However, it seems as though the manipulation architecture existed long before electrodes were being attached. The alert that shows up right before you put your phone down. Every time the feed is refreshed, something a little more provocative appears. That was not a coincidental design. According to several accounts from those present at those product meetings, it was the main point.
The lack of public outcry following the 2019 announcement of brain funding is odd, and perhaps worth considering. A couple thought pieces. A little noise from Twitter. Nothing after that. It’s possible that people had already come to terms with the fact that these platforms existed only in their minds. By then, it’s possible that the distinction between influence and intrusion had become completely hazy.
Nowadays, scientists creating digital brain twins take care to set their work apart from anything related to surveillance. According to Emiliano Ricciardi, a cognitive neuroscientist, these models start to model “cognition, behavior, and potential aspects of identity” in addition to simulating biology.You should take your time reading that sentence. Because no one has yet found a solution to the question of who owns a digital copy of your mind, be it a government agency, a tech company, or a hospital. Additionally, it seems that some of the individuals who ought to have asked sooner were already too preoccupied with constructing the machine.
