Researchers successfully demonstrate direct brain-to-brain communication

Researchers at the University of Washington, as part of continuing research, have developed a working brain-to-brain communication system. Rajesh  Rao and Andrea Stucco first demonstrated their system in 2013, and have now proved its efficiency through an experiment involving three pairs of students. The most intriguing part might be that the student pairs cooperated to play a game, with absolutely no direct contact.

With each pair, signals were transmitted from the sender’s brain to the receiver’s via the internet, through non-invasive means, moving the receiver’s hand within a split second of the signal being sent. Stucco said that the result brings brain-to-brain interfacing paradigm from an initial demonstration to something closer to workable technology. And the system requires no trained individuals, as demonstrated by the walk-in student volunteers experimented on. 

To give you an idea of what that really means practically, consider the experimental setup. The "sender" was fitted with an electroencephalography machine, which recorded brain signals and sent communicated them to the second volunteer via electrical pulses over the Web. The second participant, the "receiver", was fitted with a cap and a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil placed near the motor area of the brain, which then intercepted the electrical pulses and translated them to his brain as movement commands. 
The duo were then placed in separate buildings, with no way to directly communicate, and were asked to play a game. A simple tower defense game, simulating enemies trying to shoot the "Earth's surface, while the player has to use a surface-mounted cannon to destroy the incoming rockets. Simple enough, except that the sender only had access to the screen, and receiver only had a touchpad controller. 

So how did they play? Basically, the sender "thought" about moving his hand to control the game, and the receiver automatically reacted to the incoming commands, almost instantaneously. Three words; mind-control helmet. The implications of this technology are positively mind-bending. Once this is fully developed, we could have telepathic tutoring, mind-controlled robot servants, and even darker possibilities. 

With a 1 million dollars grant from the WM Keck Foundation, the team’s next course of action is to widen the range of information that can be transmitted brain-to-brain, including thoughts, concepts and rules and they hope one day to explore the idea of brain-to-brain tutoring.

The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.