Brain-to-brain communication
Using non-invasive technologies, scientists constructed a proof-of-concept to communicate messages intercontinentally from a brain to another.
Scientists used Brain Computer Interfaces — EEG (Electroencephalography) and TMS (Transcranial magnetic stimulation) — to send a message from the mind of an emitter located in Thiruvanathapuram, India, to that of a receiver located in Strasbourg, France. EEG takes information from the emitter, and encodes and encrypts it. TMS, navigated by a robot, then conveys the decoded information in the form of short taps on the back of the head which may create a mild visual hallucination — a stimulated sensation of light called phosphene.
A scientist shows the emitter subject a representation of bits (numbers which are 0 or 1) in the form of a target cue on a screen. This cue object is located either in the down-right part of the screen (bit = 0) or in the upper-right part of the screen (bit = 1). If the object is located in the former section, the subject is asked to imagine movement of feet and if it’s in the upper-right section, the subject is asked to imagine movement of hands. Imagining moving hands encodes as 1 and imagining moving feet encodes as 0.
The EEG feeds on the representations of imaginations in the brain. There is a ball on the screen slowly moving rightward from the centre of the left side of the screen. Its vertical movement is controlled by the imagination. If the subject imagines movement of hands, the ball goes up, and if they imagine movement of legs, the ball goes down. Through repeated imagination, the emitter lands the ball in either the upper-right or the down-right section. This is done to ensure that the imagination of movement is encoded accurately.
This information is encoded, encrypted, and emailed to the lab in France. In France, the receiver subject receives stimulation from TMS. The coil in the machine that taps on the subject-specific occipital cortex part of the skull can either create visual sensations of light or not based on its orientation.
If the coil is in the active direction, the TMS-induced electrical field produces phosphenes in vision representing bit value 1. If the coil is placed orthogonally instead, the subject feels no visual stimulations. This represents bit value 0. The receiver can distinguish between the orientations only through the presence of phosphenes.
The subject reports verbally whether or not they perceived phosphenes on stimulation. These sensations have a strong, clear and reliable nature, and are located at the bottom of the visual field contralateral to the stimulation site. TMS pulses were administered by the robotized TMS system operated by an automated algorithm that parses the emails, decrypts the message, and delivers the stimulations. A researcher sitting out of sight of the subject supervises.
The transmitted message was a binary encoding of a word — “hola” in the first iteration of the experiment and “ciao” in the second. This message was encrypted using the 5-bit Bacon cipher, resulting in 20 bits. This was then replicated for redundancy 7 times resulting in 140 bits which were sent to the receiver. This is done such that neither the emitter nor the receiver can tell the message.
The combined error rate for both the brain interfaces was 4% in the second iteration of the experiment. The emission and reception rates of the transmission were of 3 and 2 bits per minute respectively, caused perhaps by the latency of the physical systems and the emphasis on robust preservation of the message.
As opposed to sending messages determined by the subjects, the messages determined by the experimenters are sent. So, the subjects aren’t consciously aware of the content of the message. As a proof-of-concept, this is more robust because it is more prone to error. If the emitter translated a personally chosen message to its binary bits and then sent brain representations of that, they would have more control over the accuracy of the transmission.
The proposed technology could be extended to support multidirectional communication between two or more minds. You could tell what number I am thinking of. In closed mind-loops, information associated with voluntary activity can be used to inform the more unconscious, subjective perceptions created in the brain. This could help regulate emotions, pleasure/pain, depression, obsessive-compulsive thoughts and more. Read the paper here.