The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler spoke with Michael Mager, co-founder and CEO of Precision Neuroscience, and Benjamin Rapoport, the company’s co-founder and chief scientific officer. Here are edited excerpts of the discussion at the annual WSJ Tech Live conference.

man and machine

WSJ: Brain-computer interfaces, these are very exciting. What are they doing?

BENJAMIN RAPOPORT: It is a brain implant that allows you to directly control a computer or external device using only your thoughts.

WSJ: What will these be for? Who will use these?

MICHAEL MAGER: People whose brains are functional but the connection between the brain and the body has been disrupted, either due to disease or injury. These are the first users.

One person on our patient advisory board is Jules, who was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) five years ago. The brains of people with ALS continue to function completely convincingly, but over time the brain’s ability to control the body deteriorates. The prognosis is three to five years life expectancy.

We asked Jules, why do you make time for us in the time you have left? So what could this technology mean for you? He touched on three things. First, he recently had a tracheotomy, which means he can’t vocalize any words. So it only communicates through an eye tracker.

WSJ: Staring at a screen. He looks at a letter, the letter is opened.

MAGER: And he has to focus his gaze on a letter. And it chooses him. That’s five to 10 words per minute, compared to a speech rate of 150. The implant will allow him to communicate at a normal speech rate. Second, he has a 7-year-old child and wants to be able to talk to him at conversational pace during his stay. The third one wants to have some fun and play video games with his son.

Controlling a computer with thoughts may not seem like that big of a deal. But I think it has the potential to change the lives of many people.

Recording thoughts

WSJ: Describe the technology we’re talking about here.

RAPOPORT: The way the brain-computer interface works is that there are a series of small electrodes. In our case these are tiny little platinum electrodes. We work in groups of approximately 1000 people. Each of these tiny electrodes is approximately the size of a single neuron.

It has thousands of tiny platinum dots embedded in a very thin film that is about one-fifth the width of your eyelashes. This film conforms to the surface of the brain without damaging the underlying brain. And basically listens.

Each of these platinum electrodes listens to the electrical activity of the brain beneath it. Thought actually has a physical manifestation and is electrical in nature. The sensitive device essentially captures a real-time electrical video of thoughts occurring on the surface of the brain. It records them, amplifies them, digitizes them and transmits them wirelessly outside the body.

WSJ: There’s a technology called Utah Array that has been around in the human brain for 20 years and makes things like this possible. So what is the advancement that makes this so exciting now?

RAPOPORT: The first human trials of an implantable brain-computer interface with the Utah Array were conducted in the early 2000s. Advances have been made in understanding the neuroscience underlying how the brain communicates, and there have been advances in three areas of technology.

First, the material science of the interface. How are electrodes compatible with brain implantation actually made? How to understand the signals coming from these electrodes collectively, rather than individually. Moreover, the artificial intelligence layer allows us to calculate so many signals in real time.

improving lives

WSJ: What’s the craziest and greatest talent that will emerge from this?

MAGER: We noted that this work has been done in academic settings for two decades, and that people can think about clicking the mouse and it’s happening, or think about cursor control in a relatively crude way. Our goals are much bigger.

When we think about providing control of a digital device, in practice this means controlling Microsoft Office, allowing people who are currently unemployed to return to the workforce. It goes way beyond what has been shown so far.

RAPOPORT: There are at least 400,000 people with serious spinal cord injuries in the country today. And it is very difficult for them to even make ends meet, let alone have the independence and dignity that we take for granted. We think it’s just a few years away from people like this with these kinds of gaps being able to go back to any desk job in America.

WSJ: Is this becoming a consumer device for kids born today?

RAPOPORT: We design and will continue to design with a safety threshold that is high enough to be accepted by people without neurological problems. It is sometimes difficult for people today to imagine that a brain implant is the standard of care, just like elective procedures.

But many engineers have young children, and it’s not uncommon to hear: “Can I get a brain chip to play a video game?” That’s not why we developed this, but sometimes when you think about technological paradigm shifts, we just need to ask the next generation. And sometimes our assumptions are very different from those of people who grew up using technology simply as the norm.