International researchers are reporting that they have built the first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface, allowing two humans — separated by the Internet — to consciously communicate with each other, with no additional sensory cues. One researcher, attached to a brain-computer interface (BCI) in India, successfully sent words into the brain of another researcher in France, who was wearing a computer-to-brain interface (CBI). In short, the researchers have created a device that enables telepathy. In the future, rather than vocalizing speech — or vainly attempting to vocalize your emotions — your friend/lover/family member might just pluck those words and thoughts right out of your head.
This is how the brain-to-brain system works. The BCI reads the sender’s thoughts — in this case, the sender thinks about moving his or her hands or feet. Thinking about feet is equivalent to binary 0, while hands is binary 1. With a little time/effort, whole words can be encoded as a stream of ones and zeroes. These encoded words are then transmitted (via the internet or some other network) to the recipient, who is wearing a transcranial magnetic stimulation rig (TMS) . The TMS is focused on on the recipient’s visual cortex. When the TMS receives a “1″ from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene — the phenomenon whereby you see flashes of light, without light actually hitting your retina (when you rub your eyes, for example). The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field. By decoding the flashes — phosphene flash = 1, no phosphene = 0 — the recipient can “read” the word being sent.
[Paper]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4138179/
(Score: 1) by cyrano on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:51PM
Finally, the Vulcan mind melt with remote control...
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. - Kali [kali.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Lazarus on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:55PM
Meld, unless you're talking about some kind of Vulcan burger, and this is not remotely that, since this doesn't involve any actual mind reading beyond signaling a 1 or 0.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:50PM
i'm pretty sure a vulcan could melt your mind, if he chose to do so, during a mind meld.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:56PM
Feet, Hands, Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Feet, Feet
Feet, Hands, Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Hands
Feet, Hands, Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Feet, Feet
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:09PM
Boobs, Ass, Boobs, Ass...
Nah, stay out of my head!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:31PM
I hope deeper and more intuitive communication will be available without invasive subcranial implants.
Or do I?
(Score: 3, Funny) by martyb on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:17PM
Snow wrote:
Okay, I have just enough time on my hands, enough curiousity, and having previously written a Morse code generator... why not? For those following along at home, there is a nice explanation of International Morse Code at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Let's assume that this conversion applies:
Further, the use of commas here is problematic. If it were meant to separate letters, this would produce only "E" and "T". Since there are no 8-letter words containing only those letters, that must be an invalid assumption.
Let's suppose, instead, that the commas were a hasty insertion and that extraneous ones were included by accident.
In that case, we need to find where separators *were* intended between these symbols. Let's enumerate these permutations:
Then, using the above mapping of "Feet" and "Hands" to "." and "-" the only English word using all these symbols which could be generated is:
EDGE
If the mapping were reversed (Feet and Hards to "-" and "."), then there are no matching English words.
Continuing with the second instance: "Feet, Hands, Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Hands" and proceeding in a similar fashion, I could find no English words which matched for using either mapping for "Feet" and "Hands".
Now, it's my turn: =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinho on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:53PM
Great effort, but you're trying too hard. The encoding was given in TFA, and the sequences of 8 suggest ASCII bytes:
decodes from ASCII as
Haha indeed.
Like you, though, I immediately wondered why they didn't just go with Morse instead of binary; the encoding in Morse is more compact and already standardized.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by martyb on Thursday September 04 2014, @10:31PM
LOL indeed! I needed a good laugh today and now I can laugh at myself!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @08:20AM
Hands, Hands, Hands, Feet, Feet, Feet, Feet, Hands
Hands, Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Feet, Feet, Feet
Hands, Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Feet, Hands, Feet
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @01:48PM
Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands
Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Feet, Hands, Feet, Hands
Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Feet, Hands, Feet, Feet
Feet, Feet, Hands, Hands, Hands, Hands, Hands, Hands
Now for some extra text to pass the filter...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:30PM
You invented a more inconvenient and imprecise version of morse code, while also adding absolutely no new innovations to the field of neuroscience.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:03PM
You invented a more inconvenient and imprecise version of morse code, while also adding absolutely no new innovations to the field of neuroscience.
No kidding! There is absolutely no use for a string of ones and zeroes. None!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:37PM
How long did it take you to build that strawman?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @10:12PM
Whooooosh
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday September 05 2014, @12:17AM
Being a human-human interface, I think the suggestion of an imprecise Morse code is correct.
Or perhaps my working memory is minuscule compared to yours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @02:45AM
Should be faster/more efficient for him to communicate his ideas than spending 'ages' visually picking words out of lists shown to him by the system he's using now.
All he has to do is learn Morse Code and he should be 'golden'. :D
If it works out for him should he try it, it would be a big boost in awareness (and sales) to prompt other people in his situation to use this system once it is 'perfected' and streamlined.
In closing, here is a HILARIOUS short movie he 'narrated'! :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEddkIwbuKA [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:30PM
The first brain to brain interface was speech (or possibly gestures, depending on how primitive you want to go). Written word, telegraph, telephone, the internet. All brain-to-brain communication.
And just like each of those technologies, they involve one person having a thought, then encoding it into symbols, then those symbols being decoded, then the second person having a thought of their own based on their interpretation of those symbols.
There's nothing substantially new here. Yes, it's interesting we have built the technology for someone to encode a thought by thinking "head, feet, feet, head" instead of thinking "move the muscles in my fingers just so to produce letters with my pen." (or "move my fingers to touch these keys") But we're not reading the actual underlying thought within the brain that's BEING encoded. It's simply a different means of doing the encoding.
Similarly, the receiving isn't receiving a thought directly - it's receiving an encoding, decoding it, and then having a resulting thought.
Cool new tech on sensing? Sure. Cool new way to stimulate senses in the receiver? You betcha. "Brain to brain interface?" No closer than we've been for millenia.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:32PM
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:55PM
yep. been there. done that. could not escape until i stopped giving her the salami. then she found some other poor sap and i was finally free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:20PM
You just need to find a more impressionable or less bitchy (male or female) SO. Good luck, SexBot.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday September 05 2014, @08:53AM
Hell no, I learned my lesson. The next SO to act that clingy will find himself single whether he thinks it's the best thing for both of us or not, and attempts to "occupy" my doorstep can always be disrupted by a friendly visit from the cops. That, or wait until he's plugged into the Telepathy Machine, then connect my end to a continual loop of "2 Girls 1 Cup" set to the Macarena and traumatize the bugger into leaving me alone. ;-)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:27PM
I'm pretty sure the facial expression brain-to-brain interface is even older than gestures, given that you vary your facial expression unconsciously. Given that for most people, also decoding is an unconscious act, it is indeed much closer to telepathy.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:04PM
How about brain to brain communication encoded in the kinetic energy of a rock?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday September 05 2014, @12:29AM
That's funny, but if you're going to accept that then you have to say the first thing with an eye (a trilobite according to the fossil record) observing another thing with a brain is the first, or perhaps the first two things that mutually 'felt' each other (presumably pre-Cambrian).
The mammalian thing of facial expressions really is closer to telepathy than than TFA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hamsterdan on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:40PM
The MIG-31 needs you to think in Russian...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2014, @11:34PM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/ [imdb.com]
This film HAD the premise of this article!
Too bad Natalie Wood and Cliff Robertson aren't alive now to (be able to) know about this.
Can somebody pass this article along to Louise Fletcher and Christopher Walken?
P.S. Great, haunting, all too brief score from James Horner back from his 'young and hungry' days back in early/mid 1980s.
Sadly, Wood's tragic death turned the film into a 'troubled production'
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroubledProduction/Film [tvtropes.org]
Thankfully, Trumbull finished the film as a memorial to Wood but the process left him devastated and he never directed a 'big Hollywood movie' ever again....
I still vaguely remember the ending to this amazing film. Trumbull did a great job creating the final film from what he had to work with....
Getting back to FIREFOX (1982), Mitchel Gant (Clint Eastwood) was also told to not think in English and translate to Russian or the MIG-31 would do nothing/reject the input.
I remember seeing this film years ago on cable. Very nice, jaunty, electronically sweetened orchestral score by Marice Jarre (RIP). Filled with memorable little moments sprinkled throughout the film.
(Score: 2) by hamsterdan on Wednesday September 17 2014, @07:01AM
"I remember seeing this film years ago on cable. Very nice, jaunty, electronically sweetened orchestral score by Marice Jarre (RIP). Filled with memorable little moments sprinkled throughout the film."
When he fires the flare at the other Mig-31, it looks like a white photon torpedo, that was a really nice touch...
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:46PM
I feel sorry for the poor sucker who gets hooked up directly to by brain. The kaleidoscope of horrors, along with carnival mirror-like microscopes of myopathy and a torrent of pain, all moving at 100 mph while fighting off an OCD weasel on a speed and meth bender. Welcome to my world, and don't ask about that Rick Astley song. I haven't figured out how to shut it off yet.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:25PM
Your description is likely more accurate on what a real Brain-2-Brain interface would behave like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:58PM
Now we are one step closer to punch people in the face over the internet!
I really like their approach!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @08:23AM
Wait, you move the face into the hand or foot?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday September 05 2014, @12:30AM
I'm not even going to parrot the phrases for this one, just have the friggin video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww [youtube.com]
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday September 05 2014, @03:58AM
Just please let this happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs#t=89 [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday September 05 2014, @02:28PM
FTFY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @03:19PM
I remember reading a book called i robot or similar, from a faculty member of Oxford university (or was that reading university) I think the Robotics devision.
He implanted an array in his arms nervous strain and was able to do some fun things with that, and they also did something similar through a network sending pulses to one another. It was some auto biography like book, can't find it again. (Been about 15 years ago that I read it)