My most recent obsession: BMI
In my final semester at UC Berkeley, I took a class with Professor Richard Ivry called Cognitive Neuroscience (CogSci 127). In this class, a large sum of your grade is dependent on the capstone project, a project in which you go quite deep into designing an experiment on one of the following subject matters: learning and memory (meh), consciousness (not bad but we can do better), social cognition (another meh), development (decent but I need more) and brain-machine interfaces. Wait, what’s that? I recognized the word ‘interfaces’ from my career path in UX. And I recognized the word ‘brain’ quite well from my major in Cognitive Science. And I even recognized the word ‘machine’ from being one.
But all three combined was new for me. It immediately caught my attention. So I proceeded to do something very smart: I chose to do my capstone project on said subject, which I knew absolutely nothing about.
But my ignorance died fast. I began exploring. I started with some of the reader articles that were offered on the course website. My first ever exposure to BMI was from one of these research articles called: “Unilateral, 3D Arm Movement Kinematics Are Encoded in Ipsilateral Human Cortex” (Bundy et al. 2018). That’s a lot of crazy words, but all it means is that the study looked at how the same side of the brain (ipsilateral hemisphere) processes and represents 3D arm movements, even though we usually think of the opposite side (contralateral hemisphere) as being in charge of motor control. The researchers found that both sides of the brain can encode movement information similarly, suggesting that our brains use both hemispheres more than previously thought when it comes to planning and executing complex movements. Fascinating stuff.
Figure 5. from the Bundy et al. article.
During my exploration, I learned a lot. I learned that Brain-machine interfaces, or BMIs, are systems that directly connect the human brain to external devices. They have the potential to revolutionize fields like medicine, allowing paralyzed individuals to control prosthetic limbs with their thoughts, or enabling communication for those who can't speak. Furthermore, BMIs could transform industries beyond healthcare — enhancing virtual and augmented reality experiences, enabling more immersive gaming by allowing players to control actions with their minds, optimizing human-computer interactions for creative fields like music or art production, and even boosting productivity by streamlining complex tasks in engineering, design, or data analysis through direct neural control. Essentially, BMIs are the future.
Brain-computer interface helps a man with ALS ‘speak’ again.
Then a realization hit me: My career choice in UX wasn’t chosen because I was curious about how humans interact with computers. It was because I wanted to know more about how our brains interact with computers. I have always been someone curious about how things work. Computers and brains are the two most complex and fascinating machines on the planet - thus the intersection of the two is exactly where I want to be.
As I delve deeper into both UX and BMIs, I'm beginning to see fascinating parallels. Both fields are ultimately about creating seamless, intuitive interactions between humans and technology. But while traditional UX focuses on screens and interfaces, BMIs take this to a whole new level, potentially eliminating the need for physical interfaces entirely.
