The following social networks could be brain to brain – Rolling Stone

You may already have the impression that social media occupies too much of our mental space, but wait until they are literally inside our brain.

Physicists and neuroscientists have developed the world's first "brain-to-brain" network, using electroencephalograms (EEGs), which record electrical activity in the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information to the brain, allowing users to communicate directly with the brains of others – another exciting (and a bit terrifying?) example of science fiction.

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle announced last week that they were successfully using their interface, which they call BrainNet, to get a small group of people to play a collaborative type game. "Tetris" – with their spirit.

"Our findings raise the possibility of future brain-brain interfaces for cooperative problem solving by humans using a" social network "of connected brains," they explain.

To demonstrate that their network works, the researchers set up a game with two people who could see the blocks that fall on a screen and the field at the bottom of the screen in which they had to integrate, by determining whether they should be rotated. They sent signals to a receiver, who could only see the top of the screen, so that they could see the blocks, but not if they had to be rotated, based on the shipper signals. The receiver was in another room to prevent conventional communication and used shipper information to decide how to play each new room.

The senders were able to alter the electrical signals in their brain picked up by the EEGs by viewing 15-Hz or 17-Hz LEDs on either side of the screen, and the receiver received a flash light through the TMS to indicate "or no flash of light to indicate" does not turn. Or, more precisely, they experience the "sensation of seeing a flash of light", which is actually a magnetic pulse transmitted to the occipital cortex.

Five groups of three participants played 16 rounds each in this way, with an average accuracy of 81.25%.

The so-called "social network" of brains is clearly still in very rudimentary stages, with only binary signals "spinning" and "not spinning" ("yes" and "no") available for the moment, but remember How fast did we go from Myspace and LiveJournal to Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat? If they are able to send flashing lights and play Tetris now, who knows what we can communicate through electrodes and brainwaves in a few more years. Researchers are already discussing how to scale up, saying the current implementation "can be easily expanded to include multiple senders," and how to move that network out of the lab and over the Internet.

"A cloud-based brain-brain interface server could direct the transmission of information between any set of devices in the brain-brain interface network and make it globally usable over the Internet, allowing nuanced interactions between the brains of a global network. the researchers wrote in their results. "The pursuit of such brain-brain interfaces has the potential not only to open new frontiers in human communication and collaboration, but also to provide us with a deeper understanding of the human brain."