Imagine being able to communicate with others through only your thoughts. No words, no signs are exchanged: only pure information travelling directly from one brain to another. Of course, that is the stuff of dreams and science-fiction flicks: in the real world, the closest that scientists have come to establishing direct communication between brains involves an extremely convoluted apparatus andwould take hours to transmit the amount of information you typically exchange in a 2-minute conversation. Nevertheless, research on these brain-to-brain interfaces, as they are called, is valuable because it might one day allow patients with brain damage who cannot speak to communicate using other means. In a recent PLOS ONE report, Andrea Stocco, Rajesh Rao and colleagues from the University of Washington, USA, expand on previous research to demonstrate that BBIs can actually be used to solve problems, albeit in the narrow sense of the experimental laboratory.

“Guess what I’m thinking about”

In the experiment, Rao and colleagues built upon previous research from their lab and others to design the brain-to-brain interface. Two participants played a game of “guess what I’m thinking about”, in which the inquirer (the one doing the guessing) asked “yes-or-no” questions to the respondent (the one doing the thinking about). In scientific experiments, the number of parameters must often be kept as low as possible, and this one was no exception: the responder had to think of one object among 8 in a predetermined category (for instance, “dog” among 7 other animals), and the inquirer, who knew the list of objects but ignored which one was selected by the respondent, could only ask three predetermined “yes-or-no” questions (e.g. “Does it fly?”). It is in the way the responder’s answers were communicated to the inquirer that the brain-to-brain interface kicked in.

From brain to brain via EEG and magnetic pulses

image: “Huntington” by Frank Gaillard – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

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