In more brain news, researchers from the University of Washington (UW) say they've created the first successful, non invasive brain-to-brain-interface.
Don't run screaming from your computer just yet. This is a research project in a controlled lab. The researcher, Rajesh Rao, says he was able to successfully send a brain signal through the Internet to make the fingers of his fellow researcher, Andrea Stocco, move on a keyboard. Stocco was located on the opposite side of the UW campus.
Both researchers who performed the experiment were quick to point out that they were wearing highly specialized equipment and under ideal conditions and obtained and followed a strict set of "international human-subject testing rules" to conduct the demonstration.
To complete the experiment, they used a Skype connection with no video, a keyboard, one cap (Rao) fitted with electrodes and another swim cap that served as the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil, which was placed directly over Stocco's left motor cortex. The left motor cortex controls your hand movement.
According to the researchers, they are the first to do a human brain-to-brain, citing that Duke University experimented with brain-to-brain communications between two rats and Harvard researchers worked on communications between a human and a rat.
The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains. We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain - Andrea Stocco, researcher and experiment volunteer
According to the statement on the University of Washington website:
Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.
According to Chantel Prat, assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, they plugged a brain into the most complex computer anyone has ever studied, and that is another brain.
The researchers also say that in the future, this type of technology could be used to help people with disabilities communicate what they need or want - food, water, a card game and that brain signals from person to person could work even if they didn’t speak the same language.
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