Scientists Make Breakthrough In 'Telepathy'

[The Jedi Master]

Before you ask, my source is BBC News. There is an interview, and this is the text underneath the audio player:

Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two.

Neuroscientist Giulio Ruffini told the Today programme: "You can actually transmit information directly from one brain to another brain without intervention of the senses."

"The next step would be to try to find more powerful techniques to send more complex information," he added.

What is your opinion? Greatest discovery of our time? Interesting oddity? Just a false positive? If you ask me, this might be false, but at least it's from reputable sources, which leads me to believe in at least the possibility of truth. But what do you think?

[Space_Kraken]

Hmm, just finished listening to the audio file and sounds quite interesting. However, I won't make any further assumptions till I have seen more evidence.

[Godot]

Well, actually it is not really like we would imagine telepathy ...

EEG scan "reads" the thoughts, file is sent via eMail and then via tDCS (or similar brain stimulation) "sent" into the receivers brain ... see here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11077094/Brain-to-brain-telepathic-communication-achieved-for-first-time.html

Nevertheless it is extremly interesting

[Nuke]

i always figured radio augmented telepathy would be a thing one day. i guess that day is now. but il wait for peer review.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Nuke

[vger]

The trouble is, even if this works, I think it would take a VERY long time to establish a reliable connection between two people.

From what I know about how the brain works, the signal from every person, even if they concentrated on the same thing, would look very different. So if two people wanted to do this with each other, they'd need to spend a lot of time on it, giving their brains ample time to interpret the signal into something they could 'read.'

[Godot]

Seems like it isn´t as sensational as I thought ...

if I understand this correctly, the sender just thinks of a series of movements that symbolizes 0 and another one that symbolizes 1.

He then thinks of a string of movement sequences that symbolizes the binary representation of the word that he wants to send.

The computer does the EEG scan of the motor cortex and constructs a bit vector out of the string of movements the sender thinks (ideally correctly getting the binary representation of the word hat is to be sent).

Then the Bit Vector is sent and the receiver computer uses TMS to send pulses to the receivers lobus occipitalis, in a way that the receiver sees a light flash in his peripheral field of vision for every binary 1.

This way bit per bit the message is received (and can finally, after the last bit, be retranslated into the word that was sent [if everythign worked correctly])

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140903105646.htm

Nice demonstration, but not as sensational as one would think from the headlines ... and especially not as direct as one would think.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Godot

[Nuke]

The trouble is, even if this works, I think it would take a VERY long time to establish a reliable connection between two people.

From what I know about how the brain works, the signal from every person, even if they concentrated on the same thing, would look very different. So if two people wanted to do this with each other, they'd need to spend a lot of time on it, giving their brains ample time to interpret the signal into something they could 'read.'

seems like part of having such a device installed in your skull is learning an electronic language of sorts. that or use some kind of external signal processor that can interpret the data in real time. probibly a combination of both.

[lajoswinkler]

That's not telepathy just like these toys aren't telekinesis.

Let's not change the meanings of words.

[Tommygun]

I think I would call this telemetry not telepathy.

Calling someone on a cellphone isn't telepathy, even if you mount it directly to the brain, it's still a cellphone.

This technology does have a lot of potential uses, just don't start making it sound magical.

[The Jedi Master]

As far as I was aware, the revolutionary part was that it was transmitted directly into the person's mind.

[xenomorph555]

Alright lets get 2 guys linked up, time to hunt some Kaiju...

[lajoswinkler]

As far as I was aware, the revolutionary part was that it was transmitted directly into the person's mind.

No, it's been done before. It's not new per se.

[The Jedi Master]

No, it's been done before. It's not new per se.

I genuinely never heard about this, please enlighten my scientific knowledge.

[-Velocity-]

This is "just" transmitting a message from one brain to another using a means of physical communication- in this case, electronically. The only thing truly novel is that the message was sent and received directly from the brain, rather than through voice, text messaging or some other communications system.

It's just one small step on the way to our (likely) transhuman future.

[Idobox]

I genuinely never heard about this, please enlighten my scientific knowledge.

Transcranial stimulation is a mature technology, it can be done either by putting electrodes on the scalp to send DC current (used for some diseases, it can excite or inhibit parts of the brain, not very useful here) or pulses (not sure how much this is used, electroshock is this with high power, still used for certain diseases), or by inducing currents magnetically.

The magnetic one (TMS) sends AC current in a coil, and it induces currents in the brain (same principle as an induction cooker, or those cellphone charging mats) close to the coil.

Then, you also have the possibility to stick electrodes inside, for example on the retina, cochlea (in the ear, to restore hearing) or directly in the brain (deep brain stimulation is used to treat extreme cases of epilepsy, and brainstem stimulation is used to restore basic hearing).

I'm not sure what they used here, but I would guess TMS.

Recording signals from the brain can be done in many ways. Electrodes are regularly used to let paralyzed people control computers, and it looks they used that here. When you think of moving a part of your body, the motor cortex activates. Different parts of your body are controlled by different parts of your brain (a band along the central sulcus), and with a few electrodes you can distinguish between moving your left foot and moving your right arm. The signal is quite noisy, and not very fast, but it's cheap and not very invasive.

Then you have the fancier stuff, fMRI (MRI that looks at the bloodflow in the brain in real time) and MEG (measures the magnetic field generated by the brain, and reconstructs a map of currents, very large and expensive machine, but brilliant). These machines have much better resolution, and can see deeper in the brain. It is for example possible to reconstruct images you see (with a rather poor resolution) by measuring activity in your visual cortex with a fMRI.

And once again, if you can get electrodes directly inside the brain, you can get much better resolution. Once again, very serious cases of epilepsy is a condition that require it. To treat epilepsy surgically or by DBS (deep brain stimulation), you need to know what parts are affected, and most importantly what parts triggers the crises (it's usually a small part going berserk, the crisis then propagating). To do that accurately, doctors sometimes put a network of electrodes directly inside the skull and keep it for a few weeks. At that point, neuroscientists sometimes ask the patients to participate in diverse experiments, since they can record brain activity with an excellent resolution without putting the subject in a scary gigantic machine.

By combining fMRI or MEG and DBS or TMS, it should be possible to directly transmit the voice in your head into somebody's head. But that would be more expensive, and not much more useful than this.

[lajoswinkler]

Thanks, Idobox, for saving me the trouble of typing.

[The Jedi Master]

Thank you for science facts.

(I love that smiley too much...)