AI-powered medical tech will help rewire our brains, but could endanger our privacy

In his debut novel Stage of Fools, American neurologist Dr Sean Pauzauskie writes about an elderly billionaire in a coma who undergoes ultrasonic thalamic stimulation - an experimental treatment that has been shown to awaken people from these states.

Cutting-edge neurotechnology treatments like these are "a revolution about to happen", says the Colorado brainwave privacy advocate.

"These are, in some cases, the most powerful tools that have ever existed in terms of being able to influence the self, to read brain activity, to know what a brain signal is, and also to influence the biological activity of the brain," he tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.

For Pauzauskie, a practising neurologist at the University of Colorado, writing a novel was also a way to imagine what it might be like to be in a coma but conscious of what's going on around you - a state we now know up to 25 percent of people in comas are in.

Pauzauskie now tells his coma patient's families to speak to their loved one as if they can hear them and are in the state known as cognitive motor dissociation.

"I feel like it gives families peace of mind, and that's how I would treat it if one of my family members were in a coma. Two flips of the coin are pretty good odds."

In Stage of Fools, he also investigates how being in a coma changes a person and the knock-on effects for their loved ones.

Very rarely will somebody come out of a comatose state and be completely the same as they were before that experience, Pauzauskie says, and changes are often seen in their memory capacity, mood, sleep, and personality.

"People who might have been more uptight or intense may emerge more relaxed. Somebody who was very sharp and had a great memory may be having problems with that. People who were very happy or very pleasant could end up becoming somewhat more anxious or agitated. You really don't know which way it's going to go."

When somebody's identity has been changed by coma, it's always significant and sometimes "very unsettling" for their loved ones, Pauzauskie says.

"The brain, more so than any other organ, is the seat of the person. It's the seat of the self. It's everything that we are."

Neurotechnology, which some believe will enable humans to become symbiotic with AI one day, is not "ethically neutral", he says.

As a clinician and Medical Director of the NeuroRights Foundation, Pauzauskie feels it's his duty and his job to try and ensure scientific discoveries are being used only for the good.

His focus is on the "big-picture ethical implications" of neurotechnology, which, when talked about, "can get pretty esoteric pretty quickly".

Already, though, artificial intelligence is able to decode brain patterns at "unbelievable" rates, Pauzauskie says.

"I can tell you if a patient's having a seizure, or if their brain's not functioning properly, but AI is able to tell you what mood that person has on any particular day or at any given moment."

In the future, AI-powered neurotech will be part of everyday life, he says. AI will read our brain signals and enable us to "tune" them into different patterns and "induce certain states in the brain", Pauzauskie says.

"You may want to be calmer, you may want to be more focused. And AI is going to be able to tune your brain waves in a very, in a very fine-tuned way, and decode these signals.

"I'm actually wearing a pair of headphones right now that are telling me how focused I am, which is very focused."