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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @07:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @07:53PM (#207977)

    First let me start with a totally true personal story.

    Then once your all sucked in and sympathetic, I'll oppose the thing that it sounds like i should support, therefore the audience will cheer for me.

    This whole "well I of all people should appreciate this, but I don't so all of you shouldn't either" is a shitty argument "Now i'm going to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and decide that i dont see the merit in something, therefor its not worth doing, but if its something that just makes sense to me you go ahead and do all the animal torture you want, but this... well i can't imagine how this would help"

    Thank god your just a guy commenting on the internet, and neither a scientist conducting research or a regulator opposing that which he may not understand.

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