A Dream To Come True?

Researchers, in a first-of-its-kind study, have finally succeeded in establishing a brain-to-brain communication

Communication was one of the most important need of the humans that led to the milestone inventions of letter, telephone and now internet. Now a team of scientists and researchers was able to establish communication. But it is not just an ordinary communication and it is the communication of two brains separated by miles of distance. Shocking, but scientist have invented a way through which one can communicate via telepathy.

The team, comprising researchers from Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg, France, used a number of technologies that enabled them to send messages from India to France—a distance of 5,000 miles (8046.72km)—without performing invasive surgery on the test subjects.

This is how the brain-to-brain system works. The researchers used internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies. The brain-computer interface (BCI) reads the sender’s thoughts—in this case, the sender thinks about the greeting like ‘hola’ and ‘ciao’. The BCI unit then convert the words into binary codes. The binary codes are then sent via internet to the receiver’s end. Receiver has computer-brain interface (CBI) which decode the binary codes into thought with the help of TMS. The TMS is focused on the recipient’s visual cortex. When the TMS receives a binary code from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene—the phenomenon whereby you see flashes of light, without light actually hitting your retina. The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field. By decoding the flashes, recipient can “read” the word being sent.

By using advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotised TMS, researchers were able to directly and non-invasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write. Even if it does seem a little bit like hard work, there is no denying that this non-invasive brain-to-brain connection will take us to the next level of communication.

By Rohan Pal