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It's a trivial matter to send a message to someone halfway around the world these days, but just imagine trying to do it without speaking or writing. That is just what an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers recently achieved in anexperiment that successfully transmitted a message directly --and noninvasively -- from the brain of one person to that of another some 5,000 miles away.
"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 Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director oftheBerenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulationat Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
To demonstrate "the neuroscientific equivalent of instant messaging," Pascual-Leone's team sent the words"hola" and "ciao" in a computer-mediated transmission from the brain of a person in India to that of one in France. They employed Internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guidedtranscranial magnetic stimulation(TMS) technologies.
Figure 1 provides a brain-to-brain (B2B) communication system overview.
Their experiment is detailed in aresearch paperpublished last month in PLOS ONE.
Flashes of Light
Four people participated as subjects in the study: One was assigned to a brain-computer interface and was the sender of the words; the other three were assigned to the computer-brain interface and received the messages.
Using EEG, the research team firsttranslated the greetings "hola" and "ciao" into binary code and then emailed the results from India to France.
A computer-brain interface there then transmitted the message to the receivers' brains through noninvasive brain stimulation, causing the subjects to experience what are known as"phosphenes," or flashes of light in their peripheral vision. That light appeared in numerical sequences that enabled the receivers to decode the information in the message.
A Conscious Process
"TMS-induced phosphenes have their advantages and disadvantages, and other modalities may turn out to be better in the end," said Giulio Ruffini, CEO ofStarlaband a coauthor of the study.
Still, for the purposes of this experiment, phosphenes turned out to be convenient, Ruffini said
First, "phosphenes are quite reliably controlled using robotized TMS," he noted -- in other words, "the phosphene on/phosphene off condition was consistently produced."
Phosphenes also can be implemented without any peripheral nervous system intervention, making it possible to rule out the involvement of sight, hearing or touch in the transmission of the message.
Finally, "the perception of light is a conscious process, something we wanted to ensure as well," Ruffini said.
Though it's still early, technologies like this have considerable potential for people with impairments that prevent traditional communications via voice, keyboarding, eye contact and sign language, Kirk Borne, a professor of astrophysics and computational science atGeorge Mason University, told TechNewsWorld
It also could "be the beginning of revolutionary communication channels for scenarios where other forms of communication are severely restricted or prohibited," such as in combat zones, Borne added.
For the average person's day-to-day interactions, however, "this approach seems far too expensive, cumbersome and complicated than simply texting someone a message or picking up the phone or using your own voice," he said. "It is probably little more than a fanciful novelty for situations such as gaming."
Other Noninvasive Means
The next step in advancing the research is "to carry out more experiments with TMS and other noninvasive modalities," Ruffini said.
"We used a fairly simple and possibly limited technique: single-site TMS-induced phosphenes," he explained."Other noninvasive means shouldbe explored, including multisite transcranial current stimulation using multiple electrodes."Invasive solutions requiring implants are "also of great interest and potentially more powerful, but obviously more limited in practice -- at least for now," Ruffini added.
Deeper, Richer, Faster
The road will be long, Ruffini admitted.Nevertheless, "this experiment may be seen as a first step in the direction of developing technologies capable of eventually revolutionizing humancommunication, enabling deeper, richer, faster inter-human and human-machine communication," he said.Also worth investigating is the potential for "closed-loop" communication, Ruffini added, whereby information associated with voluntary activity from a brain area or network "is capturedand, after adequate external processing, used to control other brain elements in the same subject."That could lead to conscious, synthetically mediated modulation of emotions, pain, and psychotic, depressive or obsessive-compulsive thoughts.
source: technewsworld.com