Brain-to-brain interface allows one rodent to control the behavior of another

Mar 1, 2013 07:33 GMT  ·  By

A study published this past February 28 in the journal Scientific Reports shows how, by means of a so-called brain-to-brain interface, two rats were able to communicate with each other over a distance of thousands of miles.

More precisely, it appears that, despite the fact that these two rodents found themselves continents apart (i.e. the first was in North Carolina and the second was in Brazil), one of them was fully capable of influencing the behavior of the other.

The researchers who developed this brain-to-brain interface explain that their experiments basically come down to performing a mind meld between these rodents. Sources say that, in order to make it possible for these rats to communicate “telepathically,” the researchers had to fit their brains with electrodes. Thus, one rat became an encoder, whereas the other became a decoder.

Later on, the encoder was made to distinguish between two chutes, one wide and one narrow, using its whisker.

Furthermore, he was made to match the two sensations (i.e. wide and narrow) it got from these two chutes with corresponding holes (i.e. left or right).

Whenever the encoding rat performed the task correctly, he was awarded a sip of water.

The researchers then proceeded to recording this rat's brain activity, sent it over the Internet all the way to Brazil, and observed how, despite its lacking the same stimulation, the decoder learned to perform the task carried out by the encoder in the first stage of the experiment.

Thus, the decoder succeeded in picking the right hole roughly 62% of the time. It is the researchers’ belief that, given its high success rates, the decoder's pinning down the correct hole could not have been the result of chance alone.

“In this BTBI [brain-to-brain interface], an 'encoder' rat performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a ‘decoder’ rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the encoder rat's brain,” the scientists explain.

Furthermore, “These results demonstrated that a complex system was formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process, and store information and, hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and for biological computing devices.”