14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, communicating through the power of thought has been considered to be a cheap trick that con artists use to lure innocent victims into their games. Now, scientists at the University of Southampton (USouthampton) have managed to prove that this can, indeed, happen between two people. The new study constructs on previous Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) work, which demonstrated that brain impulses could be used to control machines such as computers and wheelchairs. This new study builds on that, but lead researcher Dr. Christopher James takes BCI to a different level.
In regular BCI, electrodes capture brain signals and relay them to a computer, where dedicated pieces of software analyze them and translate them into commands a computer can understand, such as streams of “1s” and “0s” (the binary code). In the new investigation, James essentially led his team to discover that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication was possible as well. “Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing,” the expert says.
“We have yet to grasp the full implications of this but there are various scenarios where B2B could be of benefit such as helping people with severe debilitating muscle wasting diseases, or with the so-called 'locked-in' syndrome, to communicate and it also has applications for gaming,” James adds. In the experiments, one volunteer had electrodes on his brain, which collected his neural signals and converted them in rows of one and zero. A computer then sent the digits over the Internet to another volunteer, where he read them on a flashing LED lamp.
The trick was that the LED lamp worked on frequencies the second volunteer could not perceive consciously. However, an EEG machine hooked up to his brain was able to determine that the visual cortex had, indeed, processed and acknowledged them. Moreover, the encoded information could then be extracted from the second brain by means of electrodes and translated into the computer screen, where the digits sent by the first volunteer were displayed. This demonstrated true B2B communication, James says, quoted by AlphaGalileo.