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- Scientists connect three brains to Tetris
- BrainNet may represent first baby steps in brain "social networking"
- Imagine having two other people in your most private deliberations
The title of the paper just submitted for all – "BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains." Developed by the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon: The first meeting of minds involved in manipulating pieces in a game of Tetris. The hope is that BrainNet can, over time, be scaled up for informationally richer communication.
The BrainNet interface
The three-person BrainNet brain-to-brain interface (BBI) system combines electroencephalography (EEG) sensory signals from a Sender's brain, decodes it, and delivers it to another person's occipital cortex through a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) Cpl. It's perceived by the Receiver as a phosphene, gold has brain-produced flash. Two senders can be connected to the same receiver.
(Jiang, et al)
YES and NO choices are represented by the circles at the edge of each screen. "BCI" stands for "Brain to Computer Interface" while "CBI" is the abbreviation for "Computer to Brain Interface."
A game of Tetris for the ages
Tetris trios
The researchers recruited 15 subjects – 18-35 yrs, eight female – and divided them into five trios, each of which is two Senders and one Receiver.
The task
The successful completion of a single round of Tetris. As in any Tetris game, the goal is to rotate, if necessary, to slowly falling piece so that it successfully completed a row at the bottom of the screen. Both senders offered advice – not always in agreement – to the Recipient.
During each of these tasks the dropping piece and the bottom row – the receivers saw only the dropping piece.
(Jiang, et al)
Thinking about a yes or no choice
As a piece moved downward, each Sender was presented a yes / no choice or not the item needed to be rotated or not. He or she was instructed to stare on the screen YES or NO lights on the screen.
(Jiang, et al)
The lights flashed at different frequencies -17 kHz per second for YES and 15 kHz for NO – allowing the EEG to use the different rates as a way of identifying the Sender's decision.
BrainNet steps in
The EEGs sent each YES or NO via TCP / IP to a decoder for a single TMS pulse that was delivered to the Recipient's TMS cap. If the pulse was strong enough, a phosphene would appear to the container signifying a "yes, rotate the piece" signal. If not, no phosphene would be seen, meaning, "no, do not do anything."
Unreliable help
It was up to the recipient to make a decision as to who was providing the best instructions. "Noise," which is to say, worthless information.
The paper says, "To trace the receiver of the reliability of each Sender and make the most reliable Sender for making decisions, we designed the system to deliberately make one of the Senders less accurate than the other. One Sender was randomly chosen as the 'bad' Sender and in ten out of sixteen trials in that session, that Sender's decision when delivered to the Receiver was always incorrect, both in the first and second round of the trial. "
Over the course of the tests, the researchers found that Recipients were getting good at tuning out their bad senders.
(Jiang, et al)
Is this what you really want?
Once the Recipient has been written down, the piece of the article is currently being translated. At this point, the senders could once again get to the Recipient who could then rotate it, if necessary, for the piece's final correct placement.
Encouraging results
The paper found in the end, "Five groups, with three human subjects, successfully used BrainNet to perform the Tetris task, with an average accuracy of 81.25%." That's pretty impressive and successful, as the report's figure illustrates.
(Jiang, et al)
Of course, BrainNet is just a beginning at best, dealing with extremely simple binary choices from Senders, and a fairly simple binary choice for the Recipient to make. This nothing like sharing a complex thought. The team may be added, levels of exchange, perhaps via fMRI, to give greater depth to the type of information that can be felt and received. Their hope, though, is that BrainNet is an early step in the "possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a social network of connected brains."
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