The first connection brain-brain - Computer Point

How Into a one-way conversation. But it took place without the mediation of words. The first brain interface has been tested successfully in the USA

Rome – The University of Washington experience the brain-brain connection through cyber-neural interface, a search that has already yielded its first, shy fruit when professor of computer engineering Rajesh Rao has managed to order with the thought of the brain colleague Andrea Stocco – assistant professor of psychology – the push of a button.

Rao wore a helmet for tracking EEG sitting in an armchair in front of the screen, watching the rudimentary graphics of an electronic game where the goal was to “make fire” by pressing the space bar on the keyboard. In another building of the university campus, Stocco was connected to a device for “intracranial magnetic stimulation” connected to the centers of the motor cortex, a brain region that controls the movements of the hand.

The two rooms were linked by videoconference via Skype to better coordinate the experiment, but neither Rao nor Stocco were aware of the “actions” and the behavior of each other. Nevertheless, the test was successful: the mental commands the computer engineer were recorded by a computer and sent – via Internet – to the PC in the room of Stocco, whose brain responded to external stimuli by pressing the spacebar exactly as would do if the command was originated by his individual will.

R esearch is therefore a test of the possibility of the reverse engineering of brain signals can be transmitted to a second brain, a first step of a direct interface between two human minds capable of going far beyond the results so far here achieved by this kind of technology.

The next step of the study on neural interfaces, say U.S. researchers, is the transformation of what is currently a flow of digital information in a one-way “conversation two-way” able to put in direct communication two brains.

Alfonso Maruccia