Everyone reading this article can congratulate themselves on their amazing abilities and good fortune. You are the lucky owner of the most remarkable processing machine in the known universe: your brain. The 3lbs of wetware inside your skull is the original neural network and vastly more efficient than the computational kind. Whereas today’s monster data centres consume huge amounts of electricity, your brain operates on just 20 watts, which you can generate by eating a cheeseburger.

Even a junk food-fuelled brain is intuitively capable of doing things that the best AI model finds difficult: dreaming up transformative creative projects; distinguishing between a plastic bag and a rock on a motorway; and detecting irony, for example. But in many ways neuroscientists remain mystified by how this network of 86bn neurons works. Recent advances in quantum sensing and AI are opening up promising new avenues of research. Yet, as is so often the case, the positive possibilities of this technology are accompanied by fears of potentially negative applications. 

One of the most intriguing brain-scanning techniques is magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive way of mapping the electronic activity of the brain. This methodology is tricky, though, given the need to chill superconducting sensors to -269C. But the recent development of optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs), which do not require cryogenic cooling, has enabled researchers to gather equivalent data in 30 minutes from a wearable helmet containing 64 sensors.