The neurologist and world expert in non-invasive brain stimulation and neuro-rights Álvaro Pascual-Leone (Valencia, 63 years old) often challenges the listener when he talks about his complex field of action and research with very close examples: “Imagine that I suffer from a locked-in syndrome (locked-in syndrome)a brain injury that blocks my brain’s ability to execute my thoughts. I’m awake, but I can’t move except for my eyes.” In that context, it’s fantastic “that technology helps read your brain and convert what you say and think into an avatar that does everything you would do because it reads directly from your brain, damaged by an injury.” In this way, he says, the integration of the person-machine would be achieved: “Being a machine without ceasing to be a person, because the one that regulates that machine is my brain.”
This is the first of many examples with which Pascual Leone supports his commitment to neurotechnologies “used well” in the interview he held with EL PAÍS within the Social forum of the last Rototom Sunsplash reggae festival, which was held in August in Benicàssim. His visits from the United States, where he lives, to Spain and his “homeland” are common for work. The forum addressed the ethical limits of science and technology in the face of the dizzying evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the threats to the human condition. A challenge in which, Pascual-Leone insists, he prefers to see the glass half full.
This boom, he says, is “scary,” but he prioritizes benefits over risks. “I am not at all a doomsayer about this. It is not something we are going to choose. These are technologies that exist. We can guide them, but not stop them,” he says. And he goes further: “We should not stop them because with them, although they bring risks, they also bring enormous opportunities for benefit to people.”
Those linked to brain health are some of them. One in two people suffers from a neurological or psychiatric disease related to the nervous system, “which makes brain diseases the leading cause of disability, above cancer or cardiovascular pathologies combined,” he points out. Neuroscience offers hope for diseases as “feared” as dementia. “It takes away the essence of your being, defined by our brain. You stop being you. You lose the Álvaro de Álvaro,” he adds.
For years, he has been dedicated to developing tools and technologies to modify brain activity in a non-invasive way and bringing them to the clinical level. He has carried out in-depth research into the brain to determine what risk factors exist —and lead to disease— in order to modify them and protect health.
“If you have dementia and we can get the right brain connections working properly, and you can still recognize your loved ones, express your thoughts and remember, it is literally giving life,” he says to argue for his optimism.
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
However, he does not forget to warn about the other side of all this and calls for rigor, social awareness and regulation to not cross the ethical line when risks arise. Like when neurotechnologies that capture the essence of brain activity and allow a specific part to be manipulated “to put that other gear you need to stop the disease” can be read by a third party “and we lose control.” Everything falls apart when “you access information about my essence that you use without me wanting it. And that is what is happening.”
He is worried about his message getting through. “Is what I said clear?” he asks repeatedly, with a humility that belies his extensive resume, in this interview prior to the talk. People vs. machines: the final frontier of rightswhich the professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School for almost 30 years and director of the Walk Center of Memory Health brain health center, shares with AI expert Andrés Pedreño.
His interest in popularising neuroscience means that he adds an example to each answer. He wants to bring the complexity of the subject down to earth, and to mitigate the fear that arises from the fact that, “for example”, the data on your brain activity captured by those headband-shaped devices to help you sleep better, “become the property of the company that sells them, because in addition to seeing if you relax, it can know what you think. And that sounds like science fiction, but it is not.”
“Manipulating the brain is not new,” he says. What is different now is that this manipulation is “very powerful, artificial and with a much greater degree of potential invasion of these technologies over the individual.”
How to regulate all this is important, he stresses. He assures that Spain and Europe have already taken steps to protect these rights and draw attention to the importance of regulating this data and the processing that AI does of it. “The definition of human rights must be expanded and integrate neuro-rights,” he asserts.
This regulation should also guide the “necessary” transfer of these technologies and the data they collect to the clinical part, adapting health systems to their arrival and implementation.
“This device you have in your hand,” he says, pointing at the phone, “knows more about you and how you function than anyone who knows you. If we can extract that information and use it, with your permission and control, to guide you, we can help you improve your health and personalize it,” Pascual Leone sums up about the ethical direction in which the issue should turn.
The mobile phone and the part of that individual essence that it is capable of retaining, gives way to another dilemma, that of people versus machines, which he addressed at the Benicàssim festival. “This separation does not exist. I would speak more of people who are machines, or machines that begin to be people. An integral part of my memory, of my brain, is this little gadget that I have in my pocket,” he says, touching his mobile again. “Machines and people merge. They hybridize. We are going to be people-machines, without separation.”
He continues with examples to illustrate this hybridisation. The representation that the human brain makes of a hand changes in blind people. It becomes larger because, he explains, they detect a lot at a tactile level and incorporate the cane into the length of their arm. This is how the brain understands it. The same thing happens if we replace the cane with a mobile phone, a laptop or a smart watch. “All this modifies our brain to incorporate it into it. We make the machine that is external into our own body, and due to current developments, we will end up with this watch stuck in our arm.”
At a Rototom Sunsplash that has addressed the climate and migration emergencies in other sessions, the technological emergency seemed destined to occupy the third vertex. But Pascual Leone disagrees. “Rather than facing an emergency, we are in an era of technology that is changing the world and that runs the risk of not knowing how to use it properly.”
In his opinion, “we lack the ability to live with human principles, in the humanist sense, in a technological world. We are not aware of the implications that this will have.” Hence his interest in dissemination, in making the dark side of neuroscience understood.
#PascualLeone #neurologist #Valencia #Brain #diseases #leading #disability