If we wire the brain, what comes to mind?

When Narayan Sankaran was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, his lab abruptly entered the limelight. His advisor, neurosurgeon Edward Chang and his lab mates announced technology that allowed one man with paralysis to “speak” through a computer screen. Though the tech was not a permanent fix and the man’s vocabulary was only 50 words, using fundamental neuroscience to decode brainwaves to full words was a major advance relative to assistive tools that typed one letter at a time. Reporters’ interview requests poured in. Sankaran remembers someone saying, "We have a moral obligation to restore communication to those who have lost it."

“That in and of itself is a compelling statement,” Sankaran recalls thinking. “But it's this interesting ethical tension, because by developing those technologies, we're also enabling a future where our inner mental private lives may not be so private anymore. It opens up a new world of technologies that are accruing data about very intimate information, our thoughts, our memories.”

That train of thought sent Sankaran’s career down a discipline-spanning path. Today, he is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. He considers himself a neuroscientist who makes fundamental discoveries about the brain, as well as a neuroethicist who asks what the consequences of those discoveries might be for society, just as he did amid the media frenzy of his postdoc days.

“The neuroscientist and the neuroethicist in me work in parallel to ensure that we both create new knowledge and that we also use this knowledge for societal good,” he says.

Cracking music’s neural code

Sankaran was a musically inclined kid. He grew up singing Indian classical melodies and playing the violin and the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument. He eventually became a jazz-trained guitarist. “It was a lot of corporate gigs and weddings,” he says. But he also was scientifically curious. “One of the most awe-inspiring things to me is how music affects us emotionally, how it retrieves long-term memories. What is this thing that operates inside our brains when we just hear a sound wave? That was a basic science question I was really interested in."

After double-majoring in physics and music as an undergraduate, he spent his Ph.D. studying the brain activity of people listening to music. That work gave him a general idea of what was happening. To pinpoint the brain regions involved, however, he needed to move from the noninvasive technique he used in graduate school to tools that directly interfaced with the brain. That called for postdoctoral work in collaboration with a neurosurgeon. Sankaran and his colleagues worked with eight patients who had electrodes surgically implanted to treat epilepsy, playing music for them and recording the electrodes’ signals. The team mapped what happens in the cerebral cortex when a person hears a melody and published the work in the journal, Science Advances.

The speech-restoring technology that made headlines also involved implanted electrodes, but they were placed over different parts of the brain that control components of speech generation like the tongue or the larynx. "I was studying the basic encoding properties of sound and communication alongside this more applied research," Sankaran explains.

But witnessing the development of technology that could read information about speech from the brain, or that could even influence brain activity by stimulating the right spots, sparked Sankaran’s interest in brain-computer interfaces and what the broader ethical and societal implications of these tools might be.

Mixing ethical considerations and fundamental neuroscience research

That interest in ethical considerations spurred his next move. In 2023, he became part of the first cohort of fellows at the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his first priorities was to co-create and teach a course that gives graduate students a framework for parsing ethical tensions in cutting-edge scientific work, including but not limited to neuroscience advances.

But he also feels strongly that as many neuroscientists as possible should grapple with ethical dilemmas and learn from the points of view of members of society. That belief is driving Sankaran’s latest initiative with the Kavli Center — a community conversation project called Wired Minds The work is funded by a grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to the Kavli Center to host Sankaran as a 2024-2025 Civic Science Fellow in neuroscience.

The Wired Minds project will create physical spaces in the Berkeley area where neuroscientists can ask members of the public about how they see brain-computer interfaces fitting into their lives and what their hopes and fears about the technologies might be. The work, Sankaran says, is “heavily inspired” by the Hopes and Fears Lab at the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of Cambridge, which has brought scientists and members of the public together in settings as varied as double-decker buses and holiday feasts.

The neuroscientists will engage with two groups that Sankaran and his collaborators suspect will have very different opinions about risks and benefits of brain-computer interfaces. One group will include candidates for the technology along with their families and caregivers. Another group will include members of the wider public.

People who have lost the ability to speak or move are likely to view brain-computer interfaces through a different lens relative to the wider public, Sankaran suspects. A proportion of the wider public may fear that their thoughts might be monitored. Others may fear that their data will be used or exploited without their permission, as has happened in some medical research projects in the past, he says. "It's understandable that there are members of the public that are skeptical about this research. We need to take these fears seriously and address them. I think neuroscience is the process of discovery about the brain. It's 'how does the brain power itself?' and 'how does the brain construct all the psychological constructs that we experience as humans?' The part of neuroethics I engage with is that part that says, 'well, what's the consequence for us as a community?'"

Sankaran and his colleagues are currently reaching out to community groups, and he expects that the first Wired Minds meetings will take place in late summer of 2025, in collaboration with public engagement experts at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Training the next generation

Sankaran is also keeping busy at the University of San Francisco. He's building a research program in fundamental neuroscience and neuroethics, searching for mechanisms that enable humans to perceive, understand, and appreciate information through sound, with an emphasis on music. Music improves people's moods and studies suggest that music therapy helps people with Parinkinson's disease improve their gait, but scientists haven't determined why at the level of neuron activity. If Sankaran's basic research manages to answer that question and the world better understands the neural code, it becomes easier for people to create devices that interact with active brain activity. Grappling with how to conduct this research responsibly is where the neurotics dimension of his basic research comes in.

As if that weren't enough, he and one other colleague are creating a neuroscience department and curriculum from scratch. The framework they have planned will guide undergraduates to think about ethical implications of neuroscience discoveries from the start of their scientific careers.

He wants to connect undergraduates to people in Veterans Affairs hospitals and at neurology clinics that stand to benefit from deep brain stimulation, brain-computer interfaces, and other technologies born from fundamental research in neuroscience. “I want to expose students to the host of possibilities that are out there…as well as the fears that exist in society.”

Sankaran hopes that by the time he retires, scientists will have an even better understanding of how the brain encodes meaning in music. And he has no intention of slowing down on either the research or ethics fronts. “I don't want to move away from neuroscience and just pursue neuroethics or vice versa,” he says. “I think these two disciplines really go hand in hand because the only kind of context in which I'm really interested in scientific discovery is one in which I can map a line towards that scientific discovery doing societal good.”