Brainet: scientists could make an internet of human brains – News – Gadgets

The monkeys kept getting better at thought control with training.

WIKIMEDIA, GENGISKANHGLinking the brains of multiple animals into a single “brainet” may be key to efficiently solving problems with brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), according to two new studies from the group of Miguel Nicolelis at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. When the rats synchronized their output signal, they received a reward.

Next, the team connected two to three of the macaques to one computer which had a display and it showed a CG monkey arm.

While this discovery is pretty fascinating, scientists are saying that this could lead to “organic computers” made of multiple animal brains that have been wired together.

After experimenting with brain-to-machine interfaces for several years, he and his colleagues found the brain was much more plastic than they had thought. Further, it was also found that 87% of the time, the collective response of rat brains was correct. “This is the first demonstration of a shared brain-machine interface, a paradigm that has been translated successfully over the past decades from studies in animals all the way to clinical applications”.

In one experiment, the researchers linked the brains of four rats, fed them stimuli representing weather data such as temperature and barometric pressure, and the so-called “brainets” were able to successfully predict the possibility of rain. Under some conditions, the authors observed that the rat Brainet could perform at the same level or better than one rat on its own. And in a successful effort to squidge people out, the researchers called these rat-borg collectives “organic computers” or, even worse, “brainets”. From there, Nicolelis essentiality turned these rats into processors.

That being said it is unclear as to what kind of use this experiment might have in real-life in the future, but a good example could be where it could be used for brain rehabilitation, like in patients with stroke where they could soon regain their mental faculties by connecting to the brain of someone healthy.

Just think of it as using science to prove that, when connected to each other with the help of electrodes, two heads – or maybe more if you’re aiming high – are literally better than one. I can imagine surgeons coordinating surgery together or mathematicians visualizing the solution to a problem together. Human brain has over 100 Billion Neurons and Nicolelis and his group is now working on different methods to develop the “human brainets”. “Can we have a memory?” he said. “One of the hopes is that we’ll be able to work with hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of neurons”. Can we store information and can we recall it later?