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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 11 2015, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the dr-frankensteins-laboratory dept.

Duke University neuroscientists have linked the brains of three rhesus macaque monkeys together using a brain-to-brain interface:

The neural network created, which the researchers call a 'Brainet', lets the animals share both sensory and motor information with one another, enabling them to complete tasks via their collective thoughts. This means they could potentially outperform a regular brain, because they now have access to the resources of a hive mind.

"Essentially, we created a super-brain," Miguel Nicolelis, the lead author of the study, told Hannah Devlin at The Guardian. "A collective brain created from three monkey brains. Nobody has ever done that before."

In the monkeys experiment, the researchers wired together three rhesus macaque monkeys and implanted receptors in their motor and somatosensory cortices to capture and transmit the brain activity. Once connected, the three monkeys were able to control the movements of a virtual avatar's arm on a computer screen in front of them. Each monkey had control over only two dimensions of movement, requiring the concentration of at least two of the three animals to successfully move the arm.

A separate experiment linked four rat brains together. From the abstract:

Cortical neuronal activity was recorded and analyzed in real time, and then delivered to the somatosensory cortices of other animals that participated in the Brainet using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). Using this approach, different Brainet architectures solved a number of useful computational problems, such as discrete classification, image processing, storage and retrieval of tactile information, and even weather forecasting. Brainets consistently performed at the same or higher levels than single rats in these tasks. Based on these findings, we propose that Brainets could be used to investigate animal social behaviors as well as a test bed for exploring the properties and potential applications of organic computers.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @04:38PM (#207926)

    have we sequenced the genome of bananas yet?

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @04:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @04:43PM (#207927)

    My father once worked in a research lab doing amimal testing, I got all the shots and paper work required once so i could go in there and see the monkeys and other larger animals they used (all the rodents and small animals you could see in the regular labs)

    Firstly, monkeys seem to like bananas way less than everyone thinks. When giving the monkeys treats i asked "why dont you give him one of the banana peices"

    My father said "here give him one and you can see why", the monkey picked up the banana piece threw it back at us, pointed at the grapes then began to urinate on the banana and cage in my general direction.