DIRECT BRAIN TO BRAIN COMMUNICATION DEMONSTRATED IN HUMAN SUBJECTS
In a first-of-its-kind
study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have
demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans.
Recently published in PLOS ONE the highly novel findings describe the
successful transmission of information via the internet between the intact
scalps of two human subjects -- located 5,000 miles apar
"We wanted to
find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out
the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second
person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication
pathways," explains coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of
the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical
School. "One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question
became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing
part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between
subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"
It turned out the
answer was "yes."
In the neuroscientific
equivalent of instant messaging, Pascual-Leone, together with Giulio Ruffini
and Carles Grau leading a team of researchers from Starlab Barcelona, Spain,
and Michel Berg, leading a team from Axilum Robotics, Strasbourg, France, successfully
transmitted the words "hola" and "ciao" in a
computer-mediated brain-to-brain transmission from a location in India to a
location in France using internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and
robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
technologies.
Previous studies on
EEG-based brain-computer interaction (BCI) have typically made use of
communication between a human brain and computer. In these studies, electrodes
attached to a person's scalp record electrical currents in the brain as a
person realizes an action-thought, such as consciously thinking about moving
the arm or leg. The computer then interprets that signal and translates it to a
control output, such as a robot or wheelchair.
But, in this new
study, the research team added a second human brain on the other end of the
system. Four healthy participants, aged 28 to 50, participated in the study.
One of the four subjects was assigned to the brain-computer interface (BCI)
branch and was the sender of the words; the other three were assigned to the
computer-brain interface (CBI) branch of the experiments and received the
messages and had to understand them.
Using EEG, the
research team first translated the greetings "hola" and
"ciao" into binary code and then emailed the results from India to
France. There a computer-brain interface transmitted the message to the
receiver's brain through noninvasive brain stimulation. The subjects
experienced this as phosphenes, flashes of light in their peripheral vision.
The light appeared in numerical sequences that enabled the receiver to decode
the information in the message, and while the subjects did not report feeling
anything, they did correctly receive the greetings.
A second similar
experiment was conducted between individuals in Spain and France, with the end
result a total error rate of just 15 percent, 11 percent on the decoding end
and five percent on the initial coding side.
"By using
advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS,
we were able to directly and noninvasively transmit a thought from one person
to another, without them having to speak or write," says Pascual-Leone.
"This in itself is a remarkable step in human communication, but being
able to do so across a distance of thousands of miles is a critically important
proof-of-principle for the development of brain-to-brain communications. We
believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the
feasibility of complementing or bypassing traditional language-based or
motor-based communication."
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