Meeting of the spirits: a social network shared between brains



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Shippers have therefore indicated their decision by looking at one of the two flashing LEDs mounted on the side of the screen, each flashing at a different frequency. Looking at the first LED reported "turn", while the second indicates "do not turn".

While the senders were looking at the LEDs, their brain waves were transmitted to the headphones worn by the receiver. The transcranial stimulation unit used precise magnetic pulses to stimulate the occipital cortex of the brain and generate ghostly lightning flashes in the brain of the receptor. The receiver can not see the game, but by focusing on the input signals of the senders, the receiver can determine whether or not to rotate the block.

Essentially, the senders passed their thoughts directly into the receiver's brain, using none of the standard modes of communication that humans have become accustomed to over millennia – no gestures, no sounds, no language. Although the system is slow and not 100% consistent, it facilitates direct brain-to-brain communication – or telepathy, if you feel dramatic.

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The research team's work still needs to be peer reviewed, but an article on BrainNet, published on the arXiv online pre-print repository, says it could pave the way for social networking neural.

"Our findings raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces for collaborative problem solving by humans using a" social network "of connected brains," the authors write.

"A cloud [brain-to-brain interface] server could direct the transmission of information between any set of devices [brain-to-brain interface] network and make it usable globally via the Internet, thus enabling cloud-based interactions between the brains on a global scale, "they add later in the document. "The pursuit of such [brain-to-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. "

But none of the technologies involved is particularly new, in fact. The pulse LED lathe has been used for more than 10 years to design eye tracking software and, more recently, to enable people with disabilities to get closer to the type of telepathic typing. And depending on how you define your terms, cerebral electrical stimulation has existed since the early nineteenth century, in one form or another. Remember electroconvulsive therapy? It was a raw vision of the theme.

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The BrainNet system builds on existing technologies by introducing a higher-level dynamic of group collaboration theory and performance testing. In subsequent game play, senders can validate and send feedback to the receiver after verifying that their collaboration partner has rotated the Tetris block correctly.

"In addition," says the research team, "by varying the reliability of shipper information by artificially injecting noise into a sender's signal, we found that receivers are able to determine which is the most reliable based solely on the information transmitted to their brain. "

Finding the reliability of a sender could only become more complicated as the network includes a larger number of connected brains. But the promise of this new mode of communication could have various applications, ranging from daily collaborative projects to medicine, allowing people to combine their mental efforts to work together and solve problems.

This could also make the Internet even stranger than it already is.

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