Two brains linked together play twenty questions

Participants were able to guess the correct object in 72 per cent of the real games, compared with just 18 per cent of the control rounds.

Can your brain communicate with someone else’s without you speaking, gesturing, or using any other part of your body to communicate with them? The “yes” response, however, was strong enough to stimulate the visual cortex and caused the inquirer to see a flash of light known as “phosphine”.

Rajesh Rao, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, said that such type of experiments will one day make people blind or help them cause “locked-in” syndrome.

“We have been able to show is that the clear exchange of simple information between a pairing of brains is possible”, he said. When applied to the visual cortex at the back of the head, TMS pulses trigger the perception of brief flashes of light called phosphenes. The EEG reading associated with either answer would send a signal to the coil behind the inquirer’s head. The inquirer could click on a question to send it to the respondent’s screen.

The experiment used two dark rooms distanced by a mile where 5 pairs of study participants were also present.

They used a brain to brain interface. According to Andrea Stocco, one of the researchers behind the study, “it uses unconscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually and it requires two people to collaborate”. The responder not knowing the answers, hardware problems, or focusing on both flashing lights rather than one could also account for errors. They could neither see nor speak to each other.

“They have to interpret something they’re seeing with their brains”, said Prat, a faculty member at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a UW associate professor of psychology. In the game, one subject would ask a series of “Yes” or “No” questions like, “Can it fly?” while trying to determine what object the other subject was thinking about, like “shark, turtle, bear, dog, vulture, parakeet, bat and sugar glider”, NBC News reported. Researchers explained that the inquirer may have incorrectly guessed the answer because he is not sure if he has seen the phosphene appearing or not.

In spite of the accurate responses that scientists have obtained with the help of their new brain-to-brain interface, researchers admit that the invention is still far from being acknowledged.

The first study of its kind, the researchers combined neuroimaging and neurostimulation to allow the brains to communicate directly via neural coding-sequences of input from sensory neurons. Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD could receive a brain signal from somebody that is paying attention. For one, it may allow for the transfer of information from a damaged brain to a healthy brain (almost like simply moving data from one full or slow hard drive to a better one).

The team is hoping to strip away the need for an intermediary in human communication – removing the barriers of language and technology for a pure connection with minimal translation.

Till now, many researches have been conducted to find out ways to set up “brain-to-brain” communication in the form of behavior, speech and so on.