Scientists demonstrate brain-to-brain communication in rats

It used to be that if you wanted to talk to someone with your brain, you needed to do it the old fashioned way - with some sort of mutant super power.  Now, it looks like scientists are putting that unlikely occurrence to rest and making sure that the future will be filled with people who can brain-chat at will, all thanks to the miracles of modern technology.  A group of researchers at Duke showed that two rats can, via brain implants, share brain information across vast distances.

The study was put together by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, one of the top-brain machine interface guys in the field.  The basic gist of it is that there are two rats, each with a brain implant and that what one rat learns the other can take advantage of.  The first rat - called the encoder - was located in Brazil.  This rat was trained how to beat a particular puzzle, culminating in a reward.  The other rat - the decoder - was located in North Carolina. 

As the first rat learned the rules to the puzzle, his brain activity was scanned and converted into an electronic signal.  The second rat then received that electronic signal and was able, with more accuracy, to best the same puzzle without training.  If you want to read up on the complicated explanation of all that science, check out the Scientific Reports account of the experiment.

This study, however, is just the beginning. The decoder rat showed only a two-thirds success rate - far below the 95 percent success rate of the encoder rat.  After working on transmission accuracy, scientists also expressed their interest in fitting more rats with the brain implants, effectively creating an organic neural network.

While I am blown away by the potential for this sort of technology, I do have to wonder what it will all come to.  Sure, we might be able to meld multiple human brains together to solve incredibly complex problems (maybe even to finally balance the budget?), but is this hive-mind in the making?  Could brain implants be hacked and people’s behavior controlled?  Could the technology be converted to wireless and used as a weapon of mass destruction? 

And on the other end of the spectrum, imagine finding someone you love and being able to go beyond just sharing your life with them, sharing also your thoughts.  For better or for worse?  Or what about going into school and having someone who’s been studying Spanish for 10 years plugging in to your head so you can pick it up in just a few months?

Only time will tell what comes of it, but this is perhaps one of the most potentially helpful and potentially harmful technological pathways in history.  What do you all think about it?  Are we ready to start directly toying with people’s thoughts?

Brain wave icon courtesy of Nevit Dilmen via Wikicommons