The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

With the proper brain-machine interface and wireless technology, there’s no reason you couldn’t control large devices such as a crane or a forklift wirelessly, at a distance, with your thoughts, in the same way that you might absent-mindedly dig with a trowel or play a guitar. Your capacity to do this well would be enhanced by sensory feedback, which could be done visually (you watch how the machine moves), or even by feeding data back into your somatosensory cortex (you feel how the machine moves). Controlling such limbs would take practice and be awkward at first, in the same way that a baby has to flail for some months to learn how to finely control its arms and legs. With time, these machines would effectively become an extra limb – one that could have extraordinary strength, hydraulic or otherwise. They would come to feel the way that your arms or legs do to you now. They would just be another limb – simple extensions of ourselves. We don’t know of a theoretical limit on the kinds of signals brain could learn to incorporate.