Scientists Connect the Brains of Three People, Allowing Thought-Sharing (sciencealert.com) 136
An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert:
Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts -- and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.
The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.... For now it's very slow and not fully reliable, and this work has yet to be peer-reviewed by the neuroscience community, but it's a glimpse at some fanciful ways we could be getting our thoughts across to each other in the future -- maybe even pooling mental resources to try and tackle major problems. "Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a 'social network' of connected brains," writes the team.
The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.... For now it's very slow and not fully reliable, and this work has yet to be peer-reviewed by the neuroscience community, but it's a glimpse at some fanciful ways we could be getting our thoughts across to each other in the future -- maybe even pooling mental resources to try and tackle major problems. "Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a 'social network' of connected brains," writes the team.
Necessary Jeagar tech (Score:5, Funny)
The last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. We now have the technology against the impending Kaiju attacks.
Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
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More like, finally the government can directly control our brains to save us from ourselves.
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Some level of brain control has long been possible, both chemically and surgically. _Thought_ control can even be done by controlling speech and other behavior. _Reading_ thoughts is a far more subtle task. EEG's, for example, average the electrical impulses from quite a wide area of the brain, so the transmission is not subtle.
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Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
When it gets dropped from an airplane.
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Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
When it gets dropped from an airplane.
If you could even drop a nuclear reactor from an airplane, all you would get is a radioactive mess. Certainly bad, but almost certainly no catastrophic mushroom cloud.
Nuclear bombs are carefully designed to put fissile material into a critical-mass state very rapidly, to release a great amount of power over a short time-period. Nuclear reactors are designed to do it very slowly, to release a moderate amount of power over a time-scale of months or years.
If you dropped fissile material from an airplane, it wo
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The last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. We now have the technology against the impending Kaiju attacks.
Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
Because writers are dumb and audiences will hoot for anything that goes boom. Or... very, very bad nuclear engineers.
They are the Borg (Score:3, Funny)
Who knew? (Score:1)
Who knew the Borg were born from a communal game of Tetris?
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Everything starts from something simple
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I bet you're fun at parties.
We are ALREADY Borg (Score:1)
A human brain is a colony of billions of neurons. BILLIONS! The only reason you can function is a person is because these neurons are networked together, and don't act independently.
These are the very two reasons that we are a higher form of life than simple molds, or single-celled organisms. We are BORG!
The further direct networking of human brains is just a re-iteration of the same pattern. It isn't some horrible thing like how it was depicted in Star Trek. We fear it because we see it as a threat to
Pre-Cogs (Score:1)
Re: Humans can do this without the machinery (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Humans can do this without the machinery (Score:5, Insightful)
Typing is a multi-hour exercise in eyebrow twitches.
Most people do not have the patience to hold a conversation with me. I wish I could shorten that word to 'talk' as it would mean fewer eyebrow twitches.
I would give all of my mod points to be able to mind-meld with other paralyzed people and 'talk' at a normal rate. Please support this research.
Re: Humans can do this without the machinery (Score:5, Interesting)
Research into linking paralyzed people to speech synthesizers and robot arms has already achieved some success. Humans can do both and patients have had limited speech and limited mobility restored by this technology.
I hope the research continues, progresses and becomes affordable to those who need it.
We have long passed the point where suffering from such conditions is inevitable and are at the point where it's now a matter of degree and of economics.
Some day, even those limitations may be overcome.
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Because of course it's completely impossible for someone who is paralysed to have not been paralysed in the past...
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Are you aware of the challenge put forth by James Randy for $1 million to prove the viability of such a claim? It does require you to pass a double blind test to prove it works.
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The James Randi prize is no longer on offer, unfortunately.
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Well, I think the first person to come up with a consistent and viable use for telepathy will make millions, regardless. They don't need Randi to justify going public.
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I say there's a lot of things that science cannot know and even doesn't want to know.
IAAS, and I will be the first to admit that science does not, and cannot, know everything.
However, science is indisputably the best tool that humans have developed to understand the universe.
Even in the hard sciences, if it's not already established it gets labeled "pseudoscience" saving everyone the bother of looking at it, and that's no way to learn anything truly new. So I say it's science that's the culprit here.
To challenge 'established' science, you need only provide evidence. What gets labeled 'pseudoscience' is sloppy, dishonest work that doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science is not the culprit that stands in the way of new knowledge. Ignorance is.
Scientists are humans, and humans have a finite time on this earth.
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This was not "connecting" brains, they used EEGs. If that's connecting brains, then so would touching fingertips, using a mobile phone to call someone, etc.
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You seen to have misapplied the magnets.
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"Telepathy as generally defined by people is Not Real. Nor is homeopathy. Nor god."
Proof?
For homeopathy, it seems there is proof. For telepathy, I doubt anyone practicing it dare let it be known.
But, for God, you have proof God does not exist?
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Humans can do this without the machinery
Sure they can. We have a clever built-in biologic mechanism to transform brain activity into almost unnoticeable air vibrations, and another clever mechanism to transform minute air vibrations back into brain activity.
Problem is of course, most people are not really aware of this mechanism and aren't properly attuned to it, so they emit mostly nonsense and often also fail to properly pick up the thoughts other people try to share with them. It is said that the ancients were much better at it, which is why t
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which is why their world was so much less violent
lol-fucking-what?
That’s surprising (Score:2)
I doubt most of the scientists I’ve met would even know what a three-way is.
Re:That’s surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Easy! A three way is a switching device with 3 connectors instead of 2. You typically use 2 of those devices to be able to turn on the light downstairs and turn it off once you get upstairs. 4 way switches exist as well although they are rarer.
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I just tried to search "threesome" on Google and it gives me a 403 error, sorry about that.
It must be my father fooling around with his filters again. Some day, I will hack into his network!
Anyway, please, can you explain to me what a "threesome" is?
Thanks in advance!
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Anyway, please, can you explain to me what a "threesome" is?
It's the same thing as a Devil's Triangle -- a drinking game.
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You've never been to the Sociology department, have you?
Already exists (Score:5, Funny)
It's called talking. We've been doing it for a long time.
Re:Already exists (Score:5, Funny)
It's called talking. We've been doing it for a long time.
Talking to my wife gives me little insight into what she is actually thinking.
This new invention may save my marriage.
Re:Already exists (Score:4)
Unless you have an arrangement, a 3-way is unlikely to save your marriage. Unless you mean that in a "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" kind of way.
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Talking to my wife gives me little insight into what she is actually thinking.
Adding a different communication channel is not likely to be helpful if the thinking process itself is incompatible.
Re:Already exists (Score:4, Funny)
I'm thinking of some worst case scenarios of the revelations of wife hooked into husband's mind.
maybe find out she has two boyfriends.
maybe find out she put a contract on her husband.
maybe find out she's going in to have her gender changed next friday.
etc.
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No, but you may find out who is really better at Tetris and who just has faster thumbs.
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Calm down, Melania, and let them finish hooking you up
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Perhaps if you listened instead? It might be too late by now.
Please excuse me, this was far too easy.
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This new invention may save my marriage.
It could ruin mine.
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Just think about your thoughts...it will probably destroy more marriages than it creates.
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That's so old-school. And it is basically finished tech, so not room for great inventions that re-create things with technology....
Andreas Eschbach "out"-Trilogy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a bit on the easy side, because it's aimed towards youth, but in those books people get connected via a small chip in the nose and it has interestingly bad effects the more people get connected.
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not a native speaker, excuse the mumbo jumbo grammar :D
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Your grammar's fine.
Already have group think working. (Score:1)
Just watch the participants at the staged "Trump" rallies. No plugins or wire necessary there. If the adage "great minds think alike" is a truism then it is also true that people with shit for brains are equally capable of thinking alike.
Re: Borg (Score:2)
Not really.
First, wrong sort of data.
Second, it is data, not a control signal.
Third, brains don't work in a way that would support a Borg-like arrangement.
Re: Meh (Score:2)
No, not really. It looked to me like they were sharing a basic set of signals.
We already know you can upload and download high bandwidth data, but we also know sharing memories wouldn't work because they're not stored that way.
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this can't end well (Score:3, Insightful)
in 100 years or so when it actually works, some guy is going to get sued for sexual harassment because he forgot to turn it off when he started thinking about a coworker in an inappropriate way.
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But then the coworker feels what this guy feels and the recursion gets its initial stage. The end condition is situation requiring a change for all involved, at the same time. The process cannot be stopped once started.
Redundancy (Score:2)
"Wretched is the body which depends on a body, and wretched is the soul which depends on these two."
I'll be getting the optimal implementation from the Designer, long before this random kluge gets to beta with a pathetic subset of functionality.
Did any of you read the article? (Score:2)
They weren't sharing thoughts. They were sharing a signal. Specifically, an LED which, they were told before the experiment, represents a move in Tetris. They aren't communicating anything of great depth, the government can't use this to read your thoughts and find out that you ran a red light on the way home last night. The whole thing could literally have been replaced with two wires. Typical web jabber that sometimes pretends to be "journalism".
Re: Did any of you read the article? (Score:2)
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Plus, according to the article, the receiver would see the signal as "phantom phosphene [wikipedia.org] flashes", meaning flashes of light which were induced into his brain by magnetic fields.
If one really wanted to transmit "thoughts" that way, the receiver would at least have to be rather quick in morse code. Actually the receiver just learned to distinguish different frequency of flashes and to rotate a tetris block depening on it.
Re: Did any of you read the article? (Score:2)
Ok, so they have POSIX semaphores.
And?
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Old news? (Score:3)
Wasn't this demoed on the unfinished Doctor Who episode Shada?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bm... [youtube.com]
Bet Skagra was on the engineering team.
Enormous understatement of brain complexity (Score:3)
The brain consists of incredibly sophisticated networks on neurons (and glia), that perform the information processing that probably leads to thoughts. The resolution of transcranial stimulation, and the knowledge of the targeted brain regions, are both too low to call this sharing thoughts. Tell me you can do multi-point m scale read/write transcranially, know the anatomy of the targets brain region in m scale in a non-destructive way, and we can talk about "thought sharing" (or even thought insertion).
This *headline* oversells the results, and underestimates the complexity. It's nothing but bait.
Re:Enormous understatement of brain complexity (Score:5, Informative)
Also, brains are only superficially alike in structure. Fine details differ from person to person, so you can't just copy a thought from one brain to another. The only way to do this is to set up a communication channel, and then the two brains practice to convert their thoughts into a mutually agreed upon signalling system and back.
A few comments back I was saying that we already have this, and it's called "talking". It got moderated funny, but I was actually serious.
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It's not funny, it's a very good point (: Language is a system to share throughs using rapid sequential air compression. We dont experience it like that of course, because our conciseness sits at some point(s) in an enormously complex processing system that masks the underlying machinery.
Awwwwww..... (Score:2)
Those Borg babies...they're so cute when they're young.
Three people, eh? (Score:2)
So how long before precrime units start wiring up precogs this way?
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I dunno, but the local cops already started claiming that their job is to "prevent crime." So maybe too late.
They work (Score:2)
"It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields."
It's called a MAGA hat.
I couldn't deal with this (Score:1)
There are enough voices in my head, thank you very much.
The Borg (Score:1)
MORE SURVEILLANCE (Score:2)
What genders? (Score:1)
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Most women claim to have been doing this throughout human history.
Tetris was created in June 1984. Fucking millennials.
social network of connected brains (Score:2)
'social network' of connected brains
That already exists, and is known as human societies. Media is speech, written text, and other non verbal signals.
adverts (Score:1)
Anyone else reminded of MTV? (Score:2)