February 28, 2013

expert reaction to new study into brain-brain information sharing in rats

Results showing a brain-to-brain interface that allows the direct transfer of information between the brains of two rats were published in Scientific Reports.

Prof Christopher James, Professor of Healthcare Technology at the University of Warwick, said:

“This paper is quite an interesting improvement on our earlier work of 2009 where we showed that brain to brain (B2B) communication is a possibility.  Using implanted electrodes (in animals) it is possible to more accurately extract information from specific brain areas, and, more importantly, to excite specific areas in the ‘decoder’ rat.

“What this shows is that we have already had the technology for a while to do all aspects of this B2B operation – extracting the information, transmitting it and stimulating.  Yet it remains crude – cracking a walnut with a sledge-hammer!  We are limited to specific brain areas (not diffuse or multiple sources), we are unsure of the stimulation patterns to use (although in this paper they approximated this well enough), and we can stimulate a specific brain site.  What this means is that we are not transmitting any complex thoughts here – so it’s not ‘I’m thinking of an animal, can you think it too?’  Rather, we are sending specific messages to specific brain sites.

“So in the case of the decoder rat, it will more often than not choose a specific left or right leg movement – not through some ‘higher power telling it what to do’ but rather because the site for left or right limb is being blasted by a gross signal influencing the choice.  One imagines that the rat has no clue this is happening, just that one limb becomes preferred.  Could you call this mind control?  Well, even that is a gross exaggeration: in reality it’s only ‘influence’ and even then only 65% of the time!  We are far from a scenario of well-networked rats around the world uniting to take us over, the stimulation is crude and specific, but nonetheless the claim of a distributed network is true – albeit mainly of interest to computer scientists fascinated by the prospect.

“The main difference to our work is that we relied on the existing senses to directly input information.  Leap into the future by, say, 50 years: if you could stimulate MANY multiple sites and we knew what patterns to use and when, then we may well be able to conjure up complex ‘thoughts’, because abstract thoughts are harder to read and represent; but not impossible technologically.  We can already do that as I’ve said, we just need to understand the brain better.

“Finally, as for the ethics: I struggle to think of any applications that would not have ethical issues.  My favourite is that of an air traffic controller, a high stress job that can also be boring and repetitive.  If an impending crash were detected, could the controller be alerted using this ‘sixth sense’, bypassing visual and auditory alarms and going straight for a more direct route?  As to the question of ‘why do this at all?’  Well, it just may be (and this is pure speculation on my part) that such a sixth sense might be faster at passing information than the eyes, ears etc. – which can take quite a few milliseconds to process complex thoughts.  Perhaps information, at its most basic level, can be transferred fastest brain-to-brain.”

‘A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information’ by Miguel Pais-Vieira et al., published in Scientific Reports  on Thursday 28 February.