14 DAY TRIAL // Let’s face it, brain-machine interfaces allowing disabled individuals to control the movements of a prosthetic limb relying solely on their thoughts to do it are no longer that big of a novelty.
Sure, they are still among the greatest breakthroughs in the field of science and technology, but it looks like the very researchers who pioneered them are ready to kick it up a notch and introduce us to something all the more impressive: brain-to-brain networks, otherwise known as brainets.
Mind you, they’ve already gone and done it. This week, a team of scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, US, announced their success in connecting the brains of rats and monkeys.
What the Duke University team did was implant electrodes designed to record and deliver electrical impulses associated with neuronal activity into the animals’ brains, which they then linked to create a network allowing the rats and the monkeys to exchange motor and sensory information.
Basically, the rats’ and the monkeys’ brains were no longer nobody else’s but their own. Instead, they were part of a system integrating information from individual sources. A superbrain, if you will.
The brainets actually worked
As if having rodents and monkeys communicate at brain level weren’t creepy enough, the Duke University researchers say that, when linked to each other, the animals learned to synchronize their brain activity to perform various tasks.
The rats the scientists experimented on were made to carry out tasks involving recognizing patterns, and storing and processing information. They even learned to interpret changes in air temperature and air pressure to predict chances of rain.
As for the monkeys, they were taught to synchronize their brains to control an avatar arm in 3D. Of the three monkeys used in these experiments, each could only control two dimensions. To move the arm, the animals had to work together.
“Overall, performance of the brainet improved owing to collective monkey behavior. These results suggest that primate brains can be integrated into a brainet, which self-adapts to achieve a common motor goal,” the researchers wrote in a report detailing their work.
So, should we be worried?
If we’re going to be honest here, we have to admit that the idea of interconnected brains sounds a bit terrifying, especially since the Duke University team behind this study argues that it’s also possible with people and even plans to try and create human brain-to-brain networks.
We’re so used to having our minds for ourselves and ourselves alone that the very thought of having whatever is going on inside our head recorded and transmitted to somebody else can be, well, scary. Then again, maybe it’s just that we’ve seen one too many movies on mind control and the like.
For starters, scientists reassure us that our personal thoughts have a too complex neuronal base to leak from one individual to the other via a network. Plainly put, the chances of achieving perfect mind meld and bouncing intricate thoughts from one person to the other are slim to none.
“These scary scenarios never crossed my mind and I’m the one doing the experiments,” Duke University researcher Miguel Nicolesis said in an interview.
On the other hand, there are a lot of perks to going the extra mile and creating human brain-to-brain networks. For instance, brainets could help with the rehabilitation of individuals with limited mobility and sensitivity by allowing them to tap into and mimic the neuronal activity of healthy volunteers.
In the case of stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak, it might be possible to restore verbal abilities faster by connecting the language regions of their brain to those of a healthy person.
Basically, their brain would not be doing the rehabilitation work all on its own, but would instead follow a volunteer’s brain lead. This would make for a faster recovery.
Besides, experiments like the ones carried out by scientist Miguel Nicolesis and his colleagues are bound to pave the way for the development of so-called organic computers, i.e. brains linked together and able to synchronize to solve more or less complex problems.
So, yes, there are plenty of reasons why establishing brain-to-brain networks is worth pursuing. As for the scary part of it all, let’s not dwell too much on science fiction scenarios and focus on what we do know: brainets have the potential to change our lives for the better.