Message sent from brain to brain between India and France

[Vikrant]

Welcome to the new frontier - telepathy.

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For the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of kilometres apart in India and France.

Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person's brain to another's even if they are thousands of kilometres away.

"It is a kind of technological realisation of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, said by phone from Barcelona.

"We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain."

For the experiment, one person wearing a wireless, internet-linked electroencephalogram or EEG would think a simple greeting, such as "hola" or "ciao".

A computer translated the words into digital binary code, presented by a series of 1s or 0s.

Then this message was emailed from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who through non-invasive brain stimulation could see flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message.

"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," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

"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?'"

Ruffini said extra care was taken to make sure no sensory information got in the way that could have influenced the interpretation of the message.

Message sent from brain to brain between India and France

 

[Moonglow]

Most impressive.....

 

[Moonglow]

Don't let my wife know, she'll have me and her hooked up so I can get her a soda from the fridge and bring it to her...

 

[LiberalMedia]

For the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of kilometres apart in India and France.

Then this message was emailed from India to France

Stop lying to us, OP. This isn't about telepathy, it's about email.

Move along, fellow users. Nothing to see here.

 

[Vikrant]

As strange as it may sound, we are not too far from being able to read minds. Knowledge that our brains emit electrical signals has been around for a while. The scientific field which studies the electrical activity in the brain is called electroencephalography (EEG). We started to notice that the electrical signature generated by the brain varies depending on our activity. The pattern in some of these signatures were so obvious that we started to identify when someone is asleep or awake. This intensified the interest in EEG. The result was a very sophisticated study which started to map our thoughts to their corresponding electrical signatures. For example when you say 'how are you', it generates a signature which is very different from the signature generated when you say 'i am fine'. Now the tools are emerging which read these signatures and translate them into their equivalent thoughts. Our ability to map these signatures to their corresponding thoughts expressed as text and vice versa is becoming more and more reliable. At the moment we rely on electrodes to measure the electrical signals generated by brain. But the research has already begun to tap into brain's electrical signal via wireless.

When that happens, your thoughts will no longer be private. Also, you will no longer be able to say that you cannot read mind.

Are you excited about that?

 

[saveliberty]

I read minds almost every day, it is called a message board.

 

[Vikrant]

Most impressive.....

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Thoughts are independent of our ability to express them into words. That is why there is a lag between when an idea comes to our mind and by the time we translate it into the text. Thoughts generate electrical current that can be plotted on oscilloscopes in the form of identifiable signature. Instead of translating these thoughts to text and then conveying them to another human. We can actually skip the translation part and communicate directly brain to brain. As we speak, researchers are working on outputting your vivid dreams into photograph. This is truly a new frontier. But there is no magic going on here. It is simple science, actually.

 

[Vikrant]

Stop lying to us, OP. This isn't about telepathy, it's about email.

Move along, fellow users. Nothing to see here.

I said:

"Welcome to the new frontier - telepathy. "

Read, educate yourself and then come back and we will talk. At the moment, the thread is way above your brain.

 

[Mojo2]

There was more to do about Telstar than this, even though this is faaaar more astounding a feat than Telstar!

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Oh...This isn't quite as remarkable if aware of the research in this area that's been going on for a while now. They're been sending neural signals to computers for quite some time. Applications for paralyzed and other incapacitated people being the goal. This is really not even a step foward from what they've been doing. It amounts to neural signals to a computer that then manipulates some robotic apparatus.

When they actually send a neural signal INTO another person's brain, lemme know.

 

[Vikrant]

^

The research in the field of EEG falls into two categories: civilian and military. The research in the military section is pretty advanced but is classified. The article that I posted is a report about the research done at a university. In this field, at the moment, the major work that needs to be done is mapping the signature generated by our thoughts into text and vice versa. It is relatively easy to map the signature generated by simple thoughts but we are still working on recognizing the patterns that are a product of complex thoughts. That is where the main hurdle is. Think of it as pattern matching in regular language in the computer science.

 

[Vikrant]

NBC has slightly better higher level detail. The significance of the news lies in the decoder hardware/software which decoded the message simply by examining the signature generated by electrical currents in the brain.

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In an experiment that sounds more like science fiction than reality, two humans were able to send greetings to each other using only a digital connection linking their brains.

Using noninvasive means, researchers made brain recordings of a person in India thinking the words "hola" and "ciao," and then decoded and emailed the messages to France, where a machine converted the words into brain stimulation in another person, who perceived the signals as flashes of light. From the sequence of flashes, the French recipient was able to successfully interpret the greetings, according to a new study published Friday (Sept. 5) in the journal PLOS ONE. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

The researchers wanted to know if it is possible for two people to communicate by reading out the brain activity of one person and injecting that activity into a second person.

"Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of [the] Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other, in India and France?" co-author Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone said in a statement. Pascual-Leone is a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

To answer that question, Pascual-Leone and his colleagues at Starlab Barcelona, in Spain, and Axilum Robotics, in Strasbourg, France, turned to several widely used brain technologies.

Electroencephalogram, or EEG, recordings are taken by placing a cap of electrodes on a person's scalp, and recording the electrical activity of large regions of the brain's cortex. Previous studies have recorded EEG from a person thinking about an action, such as moving his or her arm, while a computer translates the signal into an output used to move a robotic exoskeletonor drive a wheelchair.

In other studies, a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used to stimulate parts of the brain by applying tiny electrical currents to the scalp. This causes the neurons in a certain area to fire. For example, TMS can make a person's muscles twitch or can produce flashes of light in his or her visual field.

In the current study, the researchers linked these two processes, EEG recording and TMS. Four healthy volunteers took part in the mind-messaging experiment. One person, (the word sender) was hooked up to an EEG-based brain-computer interface; the other three people (the word recipients) received the messages in the form of TMS, and had to interpret the words based on the flashes they saw.

Using the system, the message sender, in India, transmitted the words "hola" (Spanish for "hello") and "Ciao" (Italian for "hello"/"goodbye") to the message recipients in France, located 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) away. All three recipients correctly translated the message, the researchers said.

Mind Reading Brain-to-Brain Message Sent From India to Paris - NBC News

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

They already have that technology in the rfid chip or nano chip, don't they? I am sure I heard something about this before although not via email. I was told that was how they would usher it in as a medical miracle break through of sorts - to integrate rfid into medical field.

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

Oh...This isn't quite as remarkable if aware of the research in this area that's been going on for a while now. They're been sending neural signals to computers for quite some time. Applications for paralyzed and other incapacitated people being the goal. This is really not even a step foward from what they've been doing. It amounts to neural signals to a computer that then manipulates some robotic apparatus.

When they actually send a neural signal INTO another person's brain, lemme know.

exactly - they did some research using the rfid chip or nano chip implant and then tied it with computers that gave signals to stimulate nerve endings - for people to walk again - etc. a year or two ago I read about it.

 

[Vikrant]

exactly - they did some research using the rfid chip or nano chip implant and then tied it with computers that gave signals to stimulate nerve endings - for people to walk again - etc. a year or two ago I read about it.

Our movement is controlled by signals emanating from brain. For example when you want to move your left arm, your brain excites neuron cells which convey the signal to appropriate nerves and muscles that are responsible for moving your left arm. This transmission is called synaptic transmission. If you hook electrodes to your scalp to measure potential differences at various points and plot those value as a graph via a tool like oscilloscope, you will see a distinct graph. This graph will be different than if you wanted to move your right leg for example. These distinct graphs are called signatures because they are unique for each action you wanted to carry out. The technique of hooking these electrodes to your scalp and trying to decipher those signature is called electroencephalography. For example, if you are paralyzed and you cannot move your left arm, doctors will try to generate the signal necessary to move your left army by sending electric current to your brain which in turn will excite the neurons. The patients may experience twitching when they are undergoing such therapy. Sometimes, it cures the condition and sometimes it does not depending on the condition itself.

 

[percysunshine]

"The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message."


Someone re-invented Morse code?

.

 

[Vikrant]

"The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message."


Someone re-invented Morse code?

.

There were two fields of neuroscience involved here. The first one is EEG which is used at the sender's end. You probably already know what EEG is. It has been around for a while now. I have fooled around with EEG when I was in high school as a part of our science fair. The second part, the receiver is using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to convert the received signal into brain activity by exciting the neurons. The TMS is relatively a newer break through, at least the fancy aspects of it. TMS uses electromagnetic induction to induce harmless electricity around your scalp which excites neurons and triggers brain signals. So basically, in a nutshell, whatever happened at the sender's end got reverse engineered at the receiver's end. TMS can excite neurons in a such way that you will see flashing light in front of you. This is what was used to decode the sender's message.