OK, my mind is officially blown.\u00a0 Science is just so freaking cool.<\/p>\n
Yesterday (Feb 28th), this paper was published in Scientific Reports. A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time<\/a> In a nutshell, here’s what happened.\u00a0 Researchers in Brazil read the brain state of a rat, transmitted that information via the internet to North Carolina and used it to stimulate another rat’s brain, which then performed the task shown to the first rat in Brazil.<\/p>\n In one experiment, the researchers trained two rats to push a lever when a light flashed.\u00a0 Apparently several levers were linked to different lights.<\/p>\n They separated the rats and inserted various electronics into their brains.\u00a0 Then they flashed a light for one of the rats.\u00a0 That rats brain state was being encoded and sent to the other rat. It had to depend on the visual information from the brain of the first rat to know which lever to push to get the reward.<\/p>\n It gets better.\u00a0 The first rat didn’t get a reward if the 2nd rat pushed the wrong lever.\u00a0 The communication became two way.\u00a0 The first rat modified it’s behaviors and brain function to help the 2nd rat get the right lever.<\/p>\n Now, neither of the rats was saying, “I’m going to modify my brain function to get that treat.”\u00a0 What probably happened was the 1st rat was expecting a reward.\u00a0 When the reward didn’t appear, it repeated the behavior, maybe in a slightly different way.\u00a0 Like a small child who almost got something right, it tried harder.\u00a0 My speculation would be that more focus on the task would result in a ‘cleaner’ mind state sent to the receiving rat.<\/p>\n It’s like humans, we do some things so often, we don’t even think about it… until we’re forced to.\u00a0 For example, going to pee is easy.\u00a0 Going to pee with a broken wrist requires some thinking and focus.<\/p>\n The second experiment involved rats using their whiskers to measure the size of an opening.\u00a0 That information was then transmitted from a rat in Brazil to a rat in North Carolina who performed a task based on the size of the opening.<\/p>\n One, very fascinating thing, that the researchers found was that the receiving rat’s brain actually changed.\u00a0 The 2nd rat’s brain actually created a second “whisker pattern” in its brain that responded to the 1st rat and not its own whiskers.<\/p>\n Basically, your brain has a representation of you in it.\u00a0 That representation is linked to all the sensory nerves in your body.\u00a0 That’s how you know when someone pokes you in the leg or in the hand.\u00a0 Rats’ whiskers are connected to sensory nerves and, some time ago, researchers had mapped the whisker pattern in the rats brain.<\/p>\n But the rat in North Carolina built (for lack of a better term) a second mental map for a set of whiskers.\u00a0 Only it was the set of whiskers of a rat on another continent connected to it by the internet.\u00a0 Yes, the brain maps were sent via the internet.<\/p>\n The rat’s brain was plastic enough (a technical term meaning that the brain can change) to accommodate a complete second set of whiskers.<\/p>\n These experiments were done with only a few thousand neurons mapped in the brain.\u00a0 The researchers are hoping for an order of magnitude increase in the amount of mapped neurons in the next few years.<\/p>\n The researchers are also considering whether this could develop into an organic computer system.\u00a0 There’s nothing in the knowledge or technology that would prevent multiple animals from being linked in an organic social computing network.<\/p>\n The researchers are looking at this to help paralyzed people learn to walk or control exoskeltons.<\/p>\n Personally, I can’t wait to learn Kung Fu via download.\u00a0 The only problem I see is some one hacking into a system like this and just programming humans to be smart bombs or religious zealots.\u00a0 The science fiction novel Helm<\/a>, by Steven Gould (not THAT Stephen Gould) talks about some of this kind of technology and uses for bad and good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, my mind is officially blown.\u00a0 Science is just so freaking cool. Yesterday (Feb 28th), this paper was published in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,89,10],"tags":[302,303,219,32],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-research-2","category-technology","tag-brain-linked","tag-brain-to-brain-interface","tag-internet","tag-rats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSharing of Sensorimotor Information<\/a> (PDF).<\/p>\n