Phtograph by David Torrence
Dr. Eric Leuthardt wants a noninvasive way to tap into the brain’s signals, a surer way to decode them, the ability to read brain activity at a distance, and the ability to insert information directly into the brain.
Most of us just want an iPad.
Leuthardt is the fifth most prolific inventor in the world, with about 750 patents either granted or pending. An assistant professor of neurological surgery and biomedical engineering at Washington University School of Medicine, he researches brain-computer interfaces, implanting a grid of electrodes on the brain’s surface to monitor its frequencies and using computers to decode them. In his lab, people control computer cursors without touching a mouse; make artificial or paralyzed limbs do their bidding simply by thinking of what they want; imagine remarks they might as well be shouting into a megaphone.
He won the 2004 award presented by the American Academy of Neurological Surgery, and in 2005, MIT’s Technology Review named him to its list of 35 innovators under 35 with global impact. He’s pretty smart. Was he always?
“No, they thought I was a slow learner as a kid,” he says. His father, who is German, worked in the auto industry; his Italian mother taught school. His teachers kept putting him in the slow kids’ class. “Yeah I minded!” he retorts when I ask. He remembers one of his teachers asking the class, “What is a ghost?”
He waved his hand and answered, “It’s a spectral incursion”—a deviation in light presentation.
“Would you stop talking nonsense?” the teacher snapped.
Leuthardt’s brainy—nobody disputes that anymore—but he’s not the chilly sort. He loves caring for patients, and he’s tender and grave when he talks about the severity of their brain tumors, epilepsy, and spinal-cord injuries. “You learn a lot about human nature,” he says. “And it reminds you not to waste time. Make every moment count—both for them and for yourself.”
His work with neuroprosthetics makes it possible for people with motor disabilities to route around broken connections and translate their brain’s impulses into movement.
He’s also excited about his new thriller, RedDevil_4, which comes out next summer. In it, a neurosurgeon discovers that because of a mistake he made in artificial intelligence, his high-profile patients are committing ritualistic murder.
One hates to ask that trite, inevitable question, “When do you find time to write?”—but seriously?
“I don’t eat cognitive junk food,” he says bluntly. “I made a conscious decision not to watch TV. I never want to waste time.”
In RedDevil_4, he set out to build a near-future world that reveals “the complex psychology, cultural motifs, and religious resonances that define the relationship between creator and created.” As an undergrad at Saint Louis University, he double-majored in biology and theology. He’s not religious in a conventional sense—he’s sure, for example, that physical brain activity will someday explain what looks like the magic of consciousness. But he found theology “outstanding training to understand the meaning behind things, to have a larger perspective.”
Leuthardt likes putting things together: theology and science, computers and brains. As director of Wash. U.’s Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology, he works with experts in computer science, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, physics, math, medicine, functional imaging, and radiology. On his blog, Brains & Machines (brainsandmachines.tumblr.com), he writes, “Brain computer interfaces, nanotechnology, cloud computing, and biotechnology are pushing to fundamentally alter the way that people will interact with machines and with each other.”
He’s 38. By the time he’s 50—and in part because of him—the world will be radically different. The brain-computer interfaces he’s exploring could speed up human evolution. “One of my pet theories: If you look at the rate at which humans exchange information, it strongly correlates with the rate at which science and technology change,” he says. “The printing press led to the Enlightenment, mass production to the Industrial Revolution, cellphones and social media to the Arab springs. When we are using our brains to talk directly to machines or even each other, that evolution will happen even faster.”
Leuthardt also predicts that as we interface more directly with computers, our perception of self will expand. Just as his glasses have come to seem like part of his face, he believes computers will feel more like extensions of our selves. “I think the brain is much more networked than we give it credit for, and much more plastic,” he remarks. “Information is all over the brain.” He should know; he maps it.
“People will say, ‘I’m not a math person’ or ‘I can’t learn languages,’” he continues. “The truth is, you can train your brain to do whatever you want to do, with force of willpower and practice.” He pauses, and when he resumes, his voice is quieter. “Sometimes I think people are fearful of their own ignorance. Just because they don’t know something, they feel like they can never learn it.”
He brightens again, like a kid given a complicated toy. “I look at my ignorance as a strength. I’m happy to not know something, because it means I’ll have the opportunity to learn about it.”
