Have already zipped out an email regarding this one to a friend who has done research on ESP tasks – this, however, appears to be more about EEG amplifiers being used to transmit binary signals. So don’t get too excited, oh fans of the para-fantastical!
Dr Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, from the University of Southhampton, “Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone“:
Dr James comments: “Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing.
Okay – I’m going to stop quoting at this point and direct you to Prof Kevin Warwick’s work – the Cyborg 1.0 site, in particular. Yes, I bet you thought that Doctor Who had some interesting cyberman-action going on for all those years in a fictional sense.
Do note, however – last updated? 2005. Back to the original press release:
We have yet to grasp the full implications of this but there are various scenarios where B2B could be of benefit such as helping people with severe debilitating muscle wasting diseases, or with the so-called ‘locked-in’ syndrome, to communicate and it also has applications for gaming.”
…While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDS is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient. The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.
Here’s the YouTube video, supplied with that press release – enjoy:
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Ok… where do we begin. For a start, “1 digit every 3 to 4 seconds” Anyone who has down a bit of assembler programming will tell you that the sender and receiver would die of old age before anything useful could be transmitted!
Well spotted!
I was thinking myself of adding the joke about ‘Julius Caesar by Aldis Lamp’, but didn’t want to hurt the researchers’ feelings… ;P
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