Messages Sent From Brain to Brain Over 5K Miles

First-of-its kind experiment relays 'hola' and 'ciao' from India to France
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 5, 2014 8:31 AM CDT
Updated Sep 7, 2014 7:27 AM CDT
Messages Sent From Brain to Brain Over 5K Miles
Study says it showed brain transmission from one subject to three others.   (Shutterstock)

A team of neuroscientists tapped into brain-wave-reading gear, binary code, and the Internet to transmit thoughts from a subject in India to three human "receivers" in France—about 5,000 miles away, reports Popular Science. The four participants, ages 28-50, were hooked up to equipment that looked like it was straight out of The Matrix (see pics on PopSci's site), with one subject designated the "emitter" and the other three the "receivers," reports Yahoo News.

In the study published in PLOS One, led by a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and the University of Barcelona, researchers placed an EEG cap on the "emitter," whose thoughts were picked up by electrodes and catapulted across space and time to the three subjects holed up in a lab in France. The "receivers" then latched onto the messages through special headsets that flashed the messages in a series of coded lights into the subjects' peripheral vision. The words that were successfully transmitted across the miles? "Hola" and "ciao." Scientists hope the application of this find can be incorporated into more typical communications means. "We anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely," write the authors in the study. (Read how scientists have figured out how to transform bad memories into good ones.)

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