Facebook shelves brain reading project

The social network’s brain-typing project had led it into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information

Facebook has stopped funding for brain reading computer interface. Four years after announcing a “crazy amazing” project to build a “silent speech” interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off.

In a blog post, Facebook said it is discontinuing the project and will instead focus on an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm.

While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market, the company said.

Facebook’s brain-typing project had led it into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information.

We got lots of hands-on experience with these technologies, says Mark Chevillet, the physicist and neuroscientist who until last year headed the silent-speech project but recently switched roles to study how Facebook handles elections. That is why we can confidently say, as a consumer interface, a head-mounted optical silent speech device is still a very long way out. Possibly longer than we would have foreseen.

Facebook’s goal was to turn such findings into a consumer technology anyone could use, which meant a helmet or headset you could put on and take off.

We never had an intention to make a brain surgery product, says Chevillet.

Given the social giant’s many regulatory problems, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had once said that the last thing the company should do is crack open skulls.

I don’t want to see the congressional hearings on that one, he had joked.

Given Facebook’s poor record on privacy, the decision to halt this research may have the side benefit of putting some distance between the company and rising worries about “neurorights.”

Facebook’s project aimed specifically at a brain controller that could mesh with its ambitions in virtual reality; it bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion. To get there, the company took a two-pronged approach, says Chevillet. First, it needed to determine whether a thought-to-speech interface was even possible. For that, it sponsored research at the University of California, San Francisco, where a researcher named Edward Chang has placed electrode pads on the surface of people’s brains.

Whereas implanted electrodes read data from single neurons, electrocorticography or ECoG measures from fairly large groups of neurons at once. Chevillet says Facebook hoped it might also be possible to detect equivalent signals from outside the head.