In the future, scientists say, brain-machine interfaces will do everything from helping stroke victims regain speech and mobility to successfully bringing people out of deep comas.Right now, most scientists working in the brain-machine-interface field say they are solely focused on healing, rather than enhancing.“I’ve talked to hundreds of people doing this research, and right now everyone is wedded to the medical stuff and won’t even talk about enhancement because they don’t want to lose their research grants,” says Daniel Faggella, a futurist who founded TechEmergence, a market research firm focusing on cognitive enhancement and the intersection of technology and psychology.But, Faggella says, the technology developed to ameliorate medical conditions will inevitably be put to other uses.“Once we have boots on the ground and the ameliorative stuff becomes more normal, people will then start to say: we can do more with this.”

Doing more inevitably will involve augmenting brain function, which has already begun in a relatively simple way.