EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are becoming increasingly popular, with products such as the Muse Headband and g-tec’s Unicorn Hybrid Black taking off, while in the protein folding space, Fold It and distributed/crowd computing efforts like Fold@home, don’t seem to be talked about as much as they once were.

Game-ification is still just as effective a tool to harness human ingenuity as it once was, so perhaps what is needed is a new approach to crowd-folding efforts that can tap into the full potential of the human mind to manipulate and visualise new 3D structures, by drawing inspiration directly from the minds of users…

BCI has long transcended the boundaries of traditional motor signals as carried out by the primary motor cortex. See below to see the sort of brain regions that were already being recruited into BCI technologies as early as 2009, among these speech and other cortical areas of the brain. These alternative mental data streams have been used to help those with motor cortex degeneration, adding new functions to old areas of cortex and expanding the suite of possible BCI functions to semantics and natural language processing.

Ultimately though, major expansion of the BCI functional repertoire (e.g. to deeper sensory and spatial areas) may lie in ECoG-based technologies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, that can access deeper functional areas of the brain. Important folding discoveries may be just out of reach of what can be manipulated by hand with a mouse and keyboard or by ML enhanced sleuthing of protein folding space, lying deep in the folds of the brain itself.