In a clandestine research lab somewhere in Canada, a test subject who is hooked up to a network of circuits and wires focuses all of his mental energy on a single, specific thought: Move your left arm. In front of him is a sex toy, sitting lifelessly on a table. Move, he thinks, staring at it intently. Move.
A fluorescent lamp casts a cone of light through the darkened room, illuminating a cadre of scientists in imposing white coats. Tentatively, they look on from over their clipboards, waiting to see what happens next. It’s the sort of environment you’d expect to find at an atom smasher, or the site of a daring quadruple bypass procedure. But here, all eyes are on the toy.
Suddenly, without being touched, it roars to life, pumping up and down with a soft whir. The man flashes a satisfied smile. He’s just turned it on with his mind.
The man’s name is Brian Sloan, and he’s a maven of sexual innovation. In his vision of the future, pleasure won’t require obliging spouses, midnight Tinder rendezvous, or pastel gizmos outfitted with manual dials for intensity and vibration. No, if Sloan’s dream comes true, we’ll all be thinking our way to orgasm—and controlling sex toys with our minds.
“I’m always reading about what is happening in technology,” Sloan told me. “They’re making sunglasses that have Bluetooth speakers in them. Elon Musk is developing Neuralink. I don’t know what’s coming for people’s brains. That’s not my field. But I do know that if I offered people a sex toy that you could operate without touching any buttons, that seems like an obvious thing people would want to use.”
Sloan is a veteran of these sorts of sexual disruptions. He’s the inventor of the Autoblow machine, which markets itself as the world’s greatest mechanical blowjob device. It retails for $130, and has the aesthetic of a pneumonic penis pump. It has a silicone flap for a mouth, and a plastic clip that fits tightly around the shaft, tugging up and down to mimic the suction capabilities of human lips. Sloan claims that he’s sold over 400,000 Autoblows, and he’s always in search of ways to make his gadget more efficient and devious. In the past, he’s manufactured Autoblows with voice commands, complete with a corresponding iPhone app that allows users to “customize your stroking experience,” as well as conducted a serious machine-learning study on the mechanics of blowjobs. He’s game for constant iteration on the outer edges of technology and taste, and frankly, his dream of a mind-controlled Autoblow isn’t as far-fetched as it seems.
The tech that Sloan wanted to use is called electroencephalography, or EEG, which is a way to record, process, and transform brain waves into usable data. In practice, patients are dressed up in a viscerally sinister webbing of tubes and sprockets—containing dozens of individual electrodes—which fits neatly over the scalp like a chain-mail coif. Those electrodes are capable of detecting the electrical signals that radiate off of our brains, which are originally sourced from the thoughts and instincts that light up our cortexes at every waking moment of our lives. EEG is most frequently used to diagnose conditions like epilepsy, sleep disorders, and brain tumors, but it’s also been used to operate peripherals like a video game controller, and it’s far from a new innovation in medicine. In fact, the first EEG recordings were made by German neurologist Hans Berger in 1924, nearly a century ago.
In that sense, the brain-interface laboratory hired by Sloan had a clear task at hand. Map those EEG electrodes to the settings you’d use to manually control an Autoblow machine, and enjoy a radical new revolution (perversion?) in neural tech. The lab agreed to a $15,000 fee from Sloan, and asked to keep both the individual people on staff and the organization’s name as a whole entirely anonymous. Their reasoning is that provincial funding for science in Canada can often be mercurial, and perhaps a tad prudish; if word got out that they were using their resources and collective genius to build a sublime mind-controlled orgasm device, then perhaps the faucets to various streams of capital would be permanently shut off. That said, one of those scientists was willing to jump on the phone and break down how they attempted to build a headset that would let people masturbate with their mind.
To start, they decided to focus on motor cognitions, or the brain waves that occur when you think about moving certain parts of your body. This is because simple imaginations like lifting your right arm or bending your left knee tend to be read more accurately by an EEG than more complex motions or thoughts. They’re also more predictable and objective than elaborate cognitions like, say, receiving a blowjob. This makes them ideal command cognitions, or the brain patterns researchers used to trigger the device.
Once they homed in on their commands, the researchers recruited two subjects, both men in their mid-20s who already worked at the lab. (Sloan also tried it in a dramatization of the test posted to YouTube.) They were then strapped into EEG sensors that were synced up to an Autoblow. I’m simplifying the process a great deal, but essentially, after three months of harvesting brain-wave readings—imagining the sensation of lifting their arms and legs without actually moving a muscle, letting the electrical resonance pour into the headsets—the EEG device attained a reasonably precise reading of how a subject’s brain is stimulated when it dictates those baseline body movements. Next, the Autoblow was outfitted with receivers designed to correspond with the brain data it was being fed. Thinking about moving the left arm turned the device on. Thinking about moving the left leg made the device go slower. Faster was the right leg, and fastest—a setting on the device called “Finish Me”—was mapped to the right arm.
As the technology is refined further, the scientist said there could be room to use more “relevant actions”—i.e., thinking about a blowjob—as the command cognition. This would be a necessary breakthrough if the New and Improved Autoblow is ever brought to market; Sloan wants us to think our way to orgasm, but as it stands, we can only think about our arms toward orgasm.
You can probably already imagine some of the inherent problems with this system. I don’t know how you get your rocks off, but I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say that in moments of desperate arousal, nobody—except for the most vain and Patrick Bateman-ish—wants to be concentrated on their biceps at the point of no return. In its current prototypical state, the mind-controlled Autoblow would require one to engender a Pavlovian psychosexual connection between mundane musculoskeletal behaviors and, well, oral sex, which is not an especially erotic headspace—it might be so distracting and foreign-feeling that resorting to the good ol’ fashioned do-it-yourself method might be more, er, stimulating.
It also doesn’t help that EEG devices are famously uncomfortable to wear, and require weeks of data input—and a team of experts—to wrest virtual authority over the Autoblow’s nuances. (Nobody was actually hooked up to the Autoblow while testing its settings with the EEG. Instead, they were controlling its inputs from across the room.) Overall, though, the scientist tells me they were able to achieve “moderate” success with their testing. This can work, but it’s going to require a lot more research to bring it to market, especially in a world where most neurologists are more focused on, oh, I don’t know, curing Alzheimer’s.
Sloan, it should be said, knew this would be the case going in. “It’s an experiment mainly to show what’s possible if more resources are put in, or if better technology was used to get the brain waves in the first place,” he said. “Maybe if we used a $50,000 EEG headset or expanded the field to 20 people we’d see different results, but it is very clear that the idea is possible.” (At the moment, no further experiments are scheduled.)
In the next decade, Sloan continued, he’s hopeful that some version of a thought-controlled Autoblow will be on the market. He describes it as something of a final frontier for masturbation. “If what I’ve been chasing for 15 years is to make new, better, and more interesting experiences to have sexually,” he said, “if a device is masturbating you, and your brain is doing all the work without having to deal with any human-to-machine interaction, I can’t think of anything cooler.”
