Imagine a world that involves communicating solely through the brain. Instead of picking up your smartphone to make a call to a friend who lives miles away, what if you could don a cap and make your call telepathically?
It might sound like something out of science fiction, but an international group of scientists have done exactly that, by transmitting messages from one brain to another. Most impressively, the brains were 5,000 miles apart.
"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
That existing communication pathway is the Internet, that very thing that allows us to communicate via our computers, tablets and phones. As it turns out, the Internet can also be used for transmitting information from one brain to another.
In their study, the research team used four volunteers, ranging in ages from 28 to 50. One of those participants became the sender and wore a brain-to-computer interface in India, while the other three were the receivers and wore computer-to-brain interfaces in France.
Using EEG, the sender sent two words via the brain-to-computer interface, "hola" and "ciao."
The interface translated the messages into binary code and emailed them to France. There, the computer-to-brain interfaces decoded the emails and transmitted them into the receivers' brains via flashes of light at the edge of their peripheral vision.
This light flashed in a series of numerical sequences that the receivers' brains then decoded, allowing them receipt of the message.
But did it work? The answer is "yes." The receivers correctly received the messages 85 percent of the time.
"This in itself is a remarkable step in human communication, but being able to do so across a distance of thousands of miles is a critically important proof-of-principle for the development of brain-to-brain communications," says Pascual-Leone. "We believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the feasibility of complementing or bypassing traditional language-based or motor-based communication."
Other studies have used EEG for brain-to-computer and computer-to-brain interfaces, but this is the first time that researchers have linked human brains and allowed them to directly communicate with each other.
