Brain-to-brain interfaces have arrived, and they are absolutely mindblowing

A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information : Scientific Reports In our training paradigm, animals learned basic elements of the tasks prior to participating in any BTBI experiments. First, prospective encoder rats were trained to respond to either tactile or visual stimuli until they reached 95% correct trials accuracy. Meanwhile, decoder rats were trained to become proficient while receiving ICMS as a stimulus. The next phase of training began with the encoder rat performing ~10 trials of the motor or tactile task, which were used to construct a cortical ensemble template, i.e. the mean cortical neuronal activity for one of the responses. In experiment 1 (Figure 1), encoder rats (N = 3) pressed one of two levers after an LED on top of the lever was turned on. A) Performance of encoder and decoder animals during transfer of motor information via a BTBI. Full size image (222 KB) The primary factor that influenced the decoder rat's performance was the quality of spatial information extracted from the encoder rat's M1. Full size image (314 KB)

Non-Invasive Brain-to-Brain Interface (BBI): Establishing Functional Links between Two Brains Transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS) is capable of modulating the neural activity of specific brain regions, with a potential role as a non-invasive computer-to-brain interface (CBI). In conjunction with the use of brain-to-computer interface (BCI) techniques that translate brain function to generate computer commands, we investigated the feasibility of using the FUS-based CBI to non-invasively establish a functional link between the brains of different species (i.e. human and Sprague-Dawley rat), thus creating a brain-to-brain interface (BBI). The implementation was aimed to non-invasively translate the human volunteer’s intention to stimulate a rat’s brain motor area that is responsible for the tail movement. The volunteer initiated the intention by looking at a strobe light flicker on a computer display, and the degree of synchronization in the electroencephalographic steady-state-visual-evoked-potentials (SSVEP) with respect to the strobe frequency was analyzed using a computer.

Researcher controls colleague's motions in first human brain-to-brain interface University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard. While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing. "The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind.