"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said. He said the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a nervous tic. When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. There, Stocco was wearing a purple swim cap with a device called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand's movement. The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the "fire cannon!" thought and transmitted them to the other side of the campus. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand. He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but only mentally. 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies - Rajesh Rao, University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his lab on Aug. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not the aforementioned studies, received funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.įor the new study - which was funded by the U.S. The experiment raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others.Įlectrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was also recently sent via the Internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Center's Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent them via the Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses. The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect another brain. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain." "The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," said Andrea Stocco, of the university's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Scientists said Tuesday they have completed the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington - an achievement one of the researchers jokingly referred to it as a "Vulcan mind meld."
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