An international team of
researchers have successfully sent messages from the brain of one test subject
to another without the use of invasive devices or surgery.
"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," said researcher Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone.
"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 ?'"
Using internet-connected devices
and a set-up similar to brain-computer interface studies, they were able to
relay messages to subjects over 5,000 miles apart.
According to the research team, the
success of this experiment proves that communication beyond conventional means
is feasible, and in the future could likely provide new avenues of
communication for the disabled.
They also suggest that the ability
to send messages between people's brains can lead us to a future where
interaction with computers is entirely different. "We anticipate that
computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human
brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain
communication routinely," they said. "We anticipate that computers in
the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a
fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication
routinely."
If you're interested in learning more, you can check out the entire study at PLOS One.
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