People played ’20 questions’ using direct brain-to-brain connection.
Two human brains have been directly linked to play a game over the internet for the first time.
The experiment, carried out at the University of Washington, allowed people to send signals directly from one brain to the other over the internet.
Dr Andrea Stocco, the study’s first author, said:
“This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that’s been done to date in humans.
It uses conscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually, and it requires two people to collaborate.”
For the research, two people played a game similar to ’20 questions’ — a parlour game where you have to guess what object the other person is thinking of.
One person wore a cap measuring their brainwaves (EEG) and looked at a screen, on which was displayed an object, such as a dog.
They then responded to questions by focussing on one of two flashing LEDs.
Each were flashing at a different frequency and produced different types of brain waves.
When the sender looked at the ‘yes’ LED it activated (via the internet) a magnetic coil behind the receiver’s head.
This induced a phosphene — a line, wave or blob in the receiver’s visual field.
The results showed that in control experiments receivers guessed the correct object only 18% of the time.
But, when their brains were connected via the internet, the rate jumped to 72%.
The team are now working on the idea of sending whole brain states from one person to another.
For example, it may be possible to send signals from a healthy brain to someone who has suffered brain damage or has a developmental problem.
Dr Stocco said:
“Evolution has spent a colossal amount of time to find ways for us and other animals to take information out of our brains and communicate it to other animals in the forms of behavior, speech and so on.
But it requires a translation.
We can only communicate part of whatever our brain processes.
What we are doing is kind of reversing the process a step at a time by opening up this box and taking signals from the brain and with minimal translation, putting them back in another person’s brain.”
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Stocco et al., 2015).
Network brain image from Shutterstock
