Telepathy on the Horizon: New Interface Allows Brain-to-Brain Communication

Ever wish you could read minds? While the technology to correctly call your poker buddies’ bluffs still eludes us, researchers in the UK have shown that brain-to-brain communication is indeed possible. All you need is some electrodes, a computer, and an Internet connection.

Brain-computer interfacing, or BCI, isn’t new. Researchers have used computers to read signals from the brain before — DARPA is sponsoring initiatives to use such technology to develop prosthetic limbs that respond to neural commands — but Dr. Christopher James at the University of Southampton has taken BCI a step further, showing that person-to-person communication is possible through true brain-to-brain interfacing.

In James’s experiment, two people are hooked up to EEG amplifiers that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. The first person generates a series of zeros and ones, imagining moving his left are for zero and his right arm for one. The first subject’s PC recognizes those thoughts as ones and zeros and transmits them over the Web to the second subject’s PC, which flashes an LED at two different frequencies for one and zero. The EEG extracts the LED light’s information from the subject’s visual cortex and parses it back into binary code. Thus, brain-to-brain communication is achieved.

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Telepathy on the Horizon: New Interface Allows Brain-to-Brain Communication | Popular Science.

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