Looking to bypass talking, direct communication was accomplished
An international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have been able to achieve simple and direct brain-to-brain communication between human subjects. Published in the journal PLOS ONE, a team comprised of scientists from Axilium Robotics and Starlab Barcelona was able to send simple information using electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies.
The experiments were successful thanks to Brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Recently, BCI has experienced a surge of development, with scientists being able to trigger the movement of simple robots through neural connectivity.
“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,” explained coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Director of the Berenson-Allen Centre for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Medical Centre, and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, in an interview with Science Daily. “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?’”
Pascual-Leone, along with Giulio Ruffini, Carles Grau and a team from Starlab in Barcelona, and Michel Berg and a team from Axilium Robotics (in Strasbourg, France), quickly discovered that they were in fact able to send the words “hola” and “ciao” from India to France using EEG, TMS, the internet, and robots.
To send these simple messages, researchers set up the experiment like a phone-call. One subject acted as a sender, while the other acted as a receiver. The sender thought of a greeting such as “hola,” which was then translated into binary code using the EEG’s analysis of brain activity. This code was then emailed from India to France, at which point a computer-brain interface translated the code into flashes of light (called phosphenes) that appeared in the peripherals of the receiver’s eyes.
What’s especially interesting is that subjects reported no physical sensation, but were still able to correctly interpret the phosphenes, with an error rate of 11 to 15 per cent.
“By using advanced neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and non-invasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write,” said 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 this development of brain-to-brain communications.”
From a neurological standpoint, the team’s findings shed light on the origin of communicative thought.
“We believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the feasibility of complimenting or bypassing traditional language-based or motor-based communication,” concluded Pascual-Leone.