Direct brain-to-brain communication demonstrated in human subjects

Direct brain-to-brain communication demonstrated in human subjects

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans. Recently published in PLOS ONE the highly novel findings describe the successful transmission of information via the internet between the intact scalps of two human subjects -- located 5,000 miles apart.

"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," explains coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"

It turned out the answer was "yes."

In the neuroscientific equivalent of instant messaging, Pascual-Leone, together with Giulio Ruffini and Carles Grau leading a team of researchers from Starlab Barcelona, Spain, and Michel Berg, leading a team from Axilum Robotics, Strasbourg, France, successfully transmitted the words "hola" and "ciao" in a computer-mediated brain-to-brain transmission from a location in India to a location in France using internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies.

Previous studies on EEG-based brain-computer interaction (BCI) have typically made use of communication between a human brain and computer. In these studies, electrodes attached to a person's scalp record electrical currents in the brain as a person realizes an action-thought, such as consciously thinking about moving the arm or leg. The computer then interprets that signal and translates it to a control output, such as a robot or wheelchair.

But, in this new study, the research team added a second human brain on the other end of the system. Four healthy participants, aged 28 to 50, participated in the study. One of the four subjects was assigned to the brain-computer interface (BCI) branch and was the sender of the words; the other three were assigned to the computer-brain interface (CBI) branch of the experiments and received the messages and had to understand them.

They first used 4 individuals to see if they could get brain-to-brain communication. Once that was accomplished, a second similar experiment was conducted between individuals in Spain and France, with the end result a total error rate of just 15 percent, 11 percent on the decoding end and five percent on the initial coding side.

Coming soon to a computer system near you, brain-to-brain communication.

One day they will be able to see what the other person is seeing, record dreams, thoughts, memories. All of this of course will be used in the wrong context for data mining citizens globally. It would be nice if this tech was used only to help the disabled etc. but that is naive.

a reply to: Sabiduria

Great news. Hook this thing on receivers motoric cortex, and we got a pawn to a master.

Husbands will be cleaning the house, doing laundry and knitting the sweaters. And all what wives need to do is to think about it.
And this, my dear friends, is the key to a succesfull marriage.

There of course is an alternative way of coupling the same thing. But how that arrangement would perform - equally succesfull for marriages - just cannot be expressed out in the public space.

"If you got nothing nice to sa...I mean..think, then don't think it at all...Especially out loud."

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