Can two brains really communicate DIRECTLY with each other?!
Did science just invent Telepathy?
Howdy brain people, Trace here for DNews!
Did you get my message?!
YES I transmitted it to you, brain to eye!
Science!
This week, a study in PLOS One detailed how two brains were wired together via the internet.
The news media went crazy, claiming telepathy and ESP and all sorts of other magical nonsense.
This isn't magic, it's science.
Basically, what this international group of scientists have done is use a brain computer
interface, or BCI, to read the activity from one brain.
They took that reading and translated it into a binary message.
Then they sent it to through the internet, and decoded it on the other end to put it
into a different type of computer-brain interface, or CBI.
The CBI then sends the signal into the receivers brain aaaaaand that's it.
Yeah.
It's a lot, but hang on, we'll go through it.
First, reading a brain isn't anything new.
We've been using the technology used in this experiment since the 1870s; it's called electroencephalography.
EEGs read the movement of ions through the brain, and they've become sensitive enough
to do so without being physically implanted.
Both the sender and the computer had to be trained first to encode the binary message…
they did so by moving their hands for a 1 and feet for a 0.
They did this so the "language" would be understood by the sender and the receiver.
The movement creates specific electrical signals in the brain that were picked up by the EEG
and e-mailed to three computers 5,000 miles away.
We've done this a ton of times, this alone isn't that big a deal.
Usually, scientists do this to show that a brain can control a wheelchair, robotic arm
or even another animal -- like the tail of a rat.
[a]But in this case, we can't beam a signal right into another human's brain, so the researchers
analyzed the best spots on the receivers' brains to stimulate phosphenes, or little
flashes of light on the periphery of human vision.
When you rub your eyes, the lights you see are phosphenes.
So when the receiving computer got the email with the binary code, it was sent to a robot-assisted
transcranial magnetic stimulator, or TMS.
The robot had been pre-programmed to select the part of the brain that produces those
phosphenes in the subject's peripheral vision.
It moved to that spot, and activated magnets and created the phosphenes!
The subjects would then see lights corresponding to the message in binary…
so zero, one, one, zero, zero, became long and shorts, like morse code!
And that's that!
One brain, sent a message to another!
Great care was taken to keep the receiver isolated from any other sensory input.
They even made them wear blindfolds and earplugs.
It's not exactly magical once you break it all down, is it?
It feels more like a jury-rigged set of science experiments all thrown together… which is
exactly what it is.
As iO9 wrote, "it wasn't the most elegant set-up," which is putting it lightly.
All I can think is, we can TOTALLY simplify this, which is really exciting.
This is just the very first tiny step down a long road of brain-to-brain networking.
There may come a day when you can control your computer with your thoughts, or shoot
a quick brain message to your boyfriend, transmit a complicated emotion to your friend, or even
live as a Borgian collective with everyone!
But, for now, this is what we've got.
What would you want to say if you could communicate brain-to-brain?
The comments are the perfect place to test out some telepathy jokes!
Share them with me, and thanks for watching DNews.
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