Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis foresees a day when our brains really will be interconnected in what he calls a brain-net, and we won't even need aliens to achieve it. In his lab at Duke University, Nicolelis has taken the first steps toward bringing brain-to-brain communication into reality by electronically connecting rats' brains. The results are published in today's issue of Scientific Reports.
In Nicolelis's experiments, two thirsty rats are placed into separate, identical cages. They cannot see or hear each other, but their brains are wired together via electrode implants in their motor cortices.
The rats have been trained to push a lever on cue. In this case, the cue is a light that flashes above the correct lever. When the rat steps on the correct lever, it is rewarded with a sip of water. However, only the first rat sees the light signal. To get a taste of that sweet H2O, rat No. 2 has to interpret rat No. 1's thoughts.
The idea is this: The left light blinks on in Rat No. 1's cage, so it steps on the left-hand lever. As it does this, neurons in the motor cortex fire in a specific way. The implanted electrode captures those electric signals, translates them into binary code, and sends the signal through a wire to the electrode in Rat No. 2's brain. There the signal is translated back into neural signals, hopefully hinting to rat No. 2 to step on the left-hand lever. If rat No. 1 were to step on the right-hand lever, his neurons would fire differently, sending a distinct signal to rat No. 2.
Based on the information from rat No. 1, the second rat pushed the correct lever 85 percent of the time in the experiments. The rats could still communicate telepathically even when one of the animals was relocated from the North Carolina lab to Brazil. The only difference was that the brain signals, traveling over the Internet, took a little bit longer to reach rat No. 2.
To Christopher James, a biomedical engineer who studies brain-machine interfaces at the University of Warwick (and who was not involved in the study), the research proves that "we already have the technology to do this sort of brain-to-brain communication. It's a bit crude, but we could do it."
Andrew Schwartz, a neurobiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, however, was unimpressed by the fact that the rats' decisions were binary?left versus right?meaning the rats had a 50 percent chance of hitting the correct lever just by guessing. Schwartz says that brain-controlled machines have already advanced far beyond that point. For example, his own lab has hooked up monkey brains to computers, allowing a macaque to control a robotic arm in three dimensions using just its thoughts. These results have been replicated in humans as well, enabling a quadriplegic woman to feed herself chocolate using a mind-controlled robotic arm.
Organic Computers
Still, Nicolelis says that as brain-to-brain communication becomes more sophisticated, it may open up all sorts of applications that we haven't even imagined yet. One of the next steps for his lab will be to interconnect multiple rats into one network. By interconnecting the rats' brains wirelessly, allowing them to move freely and socialize, the researchers hope to see how the animals adapt to and use this new form of communication.
Nicolelis says he wants to see if the interconnected brains could develop emergent properties?unique traits that result from the interactions of many parts, similar to how the simple cells in a brain come together to form a complex mind and personality. Networks of interconnected brains could even form an organic computer that solves problems differently from a silicon processor, Nicolelis says. "I'm curious to see if I could store information in a distributed brain network like this," he says. "The memory would be built of many animals."
However, James warns, if those emergent properties of multibrain systems are possible, they might not be achievable with this experimental setup. "The big advantage that we have in the human brain [as compared to a processor] is that it's massively parallel and massively interconnected," he says. By contrast, Nicolelis's brain-to-brain interfaces link up only localized portions of the brain using a narrow wire rather than connecting entire brains with lots of data flowing in between. "I think that the connections and the links are the bottleneck here. So as it stands, the sum is not necessarily better than the individual parts," James says. If scientists could figure out how to massively interconnect the brains, he says, it may be possible to create something greater.
Even if you could create noninvasive tech to connect human brains in this way, it could be impossible to transmit abstract thoughts. That's because even a task as simple as imagining a rabbit would require multiple parts of the brain, and reproducing the rabbit in another person's brain would require having a detailed map of that second person's brain (which varies from individual to individual) and stimulating multiple parts of the brain in specific patterns at different times. That may be doable someday, according to Nicolelis and James, but not today.
As for what it feels like to have another organism's brain signals entering your own, the rats aren't talking. It's not as if a voice of God is telling them to go to the left or go to the right. It's probably more like a hint or an impulse. "The brain of the animal is noisy, and we are sending a little whisper," Nicolelis says.
Mind Melding?
The possibilities of such a mental link are tantalizing. Militaries may want soldiers who are mentally in tune with each other. It could make empathy easier, allowing us to see the world through another person's perspective. And communication could be faster and more efficient.
"If you're reading, you have to go through and mechanically move the eyes," James says. "There's a delay in getting the information into the brain, and then you have to decode the information and so on. And it's similar if you're listening to words. It may well be that you can take ideas at the raw stage and transmit them and push them forward without having to encode and decode them . . . although that's complete and utter speculation on my part."
Such an efficient communication could save lives during an emergency situation, James points out, because the alert system could bypass the senses. "You could see this as an augmentation, the whole sixth-sense idea. I can see, I can taste, I can talk, I can listen, but I can also have this awareness which is directly implanted into my brain."
If those advances are possible, they are still decades away. In the nearer term, scientists need to confirm that information transfer works in different areas of the rat brain, and for different tasks. They'll need to develop more detailed maps of the human brain and invent new forms of technology to transmit enormous amounts of information wirelessly. And society must decide whether we're comfortable with such a thing.
Nicolelis, for one, says he has "no doubt" that humans will link up our minds eventually, and he's proved that it may indeed be possible.
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The poster. All employers covered under the FMLA are required to display this poster, which explains employees' rights under the law and tells workers how to file a complaint. You must display the poster, the DOL says, in "a conspicuous place where employees and applicants for employment can see it." If your organization is covered by the law, a poster must be displayed at all locations, even if there are no eligible employees.
A two-week-old Chimpanzee in West Java. 
Animal Wise by Virginia Morell. 
