A four-handed game

Scientists confirm the possibility of direct signal transmission
from one person's brain to another person's brain connected via the internet

DailyTechInfo based on the materials of Inhabitat: UW Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in HumansResearchers from the University of Washington (University of Washington) conducted a successful demonstration of a computer interface that allows the Internet to transmit signals read from the brain of one person directly to the brain of another person.

At the same time, despite the split-second delay, the brain-computer-Internet-computer-brain interface implemented by scientists allowed one person to control the movements of another. Due to the fact that these works are carried out under the auspices of the US Army Research Office, it is not surprising that in the last demonstration a shooting game was used and an imitation of actions with explosive devices was performed. The US military sees such technology as an opportunity to bypass the language barrier and differences in experience between two people who need to work together to do some possibly dangerous work with the help of direct information transmission.

Interface diagram

The first demonstration of the operability of this system was held last year. And the current demonstration not only confirmed the workability of the idea itself, but also showed some of its expanded capabilities. As before, one of the participants, the one who remotely controls the actions of another person, puts on EEG sensors, with which a computer reads pictures of brain activity of certain parts of the brain. This data is digitized and transmitted via the Internet to another computer, which performs the entire sequence in reverse order. The second person, the performer, is under the influence of a magnetic field induced by a coil directed to the area of the brain that controls the movements of the hands. A human operator can send a command to another person and for this he does not even need to move, he just needs to imagine that he is moving his hand. The human performer receives commands from the outside using transcranial magnetic stimulation technology, and his hands move independently of his consciousness.

In their experiments, the researchers tested the performance of the system on three pairs of participants. The operator and the performer were always located in two buildings, the distance between which was equal to 1.5 kilometers and between which only one digital communication line was laid. "The first operator was involved in a computer game in which he had to defend the city from attack, using weapons of various types and shooting down missiles launched by the enemy. At the same time, he was completely deprived of the possibility of physical impact on the gameplay. The only way the operator could play the game was by mentally controlling the movements of his hands and fingers," the researchers from Washington write, "The accuracy of the game varied greatly from pair to pair and ranged from 25 to 83 percent. And the biggest level of errors occurred in the execution of the "fire" command."

Currently, the researchers have received a grant of one million dollars from the W.M. Keck Foundation, thanks to which they will be able to continue and expand the field of their research. As part of the new stage, researchers are going to learn how to decipher and transmit more complex brain processes, expand the number of types of information transmitted, which will allow the transfer of concepts, thoughts and rules. Thanks to this, at least scientists are counting on it, it will be possible to implement such fantastic technologies in the near future, with the help of which, for example, brilliant scientists will be able to transfer their knowledge directly to students, or virtuoso musicians or surgeons will be able to perform operations remotely, acting with the hands of other people.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.11.2014