Anyone who has ever read neurologist Oliver Sacks’ classic essay collection ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’ might wonder about the downsides of having a protein nanowire brain extension. The lesson from the book is that small changes to the brain can have enormous consequences for consciousness and our experience of reality.

Who knows? Perhaps it might be like a permanent magic mushroom trip where you can see and talk to interdimensional machine elves, and that would be an upside for some people.