One rat brain 'talks' to another using electronic link

One possible path of development is toward the neural jack - basically a standardized plug port, a USB interface for the brain. Here's a page describing some Japanese research toward it:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Resources/Hosted/Resource.ph...

I imagine the following: the jack outputs nerve impulses from the brain. Feed these impulses into a robot's control interface/"API", and the user's brain will be able to adaptively learn to control the various functions offered (e.g. flick a finger to make the robot's hand perform the same action). Even better, the robot uses a learning algorithm to associate the nervous data with the correct action through feedback from the user, so that eventually, the user's moving his hand causes the robot to do the same. Voila, exo-suits controlled directly by the brain.

If you can pass data back into the brain through the jack, you can return tactile feedback from the robot arm, or even sensations that represent other information, e.g. light or gas levels in the environment detected by mechanical sensors. I doubt human brains can process information that doesn't fit in our spectrum of senses, e.g. mathematical patterns, or abstract conceptual knowledge like an understanding of democracy, but maybe they can accept visualizations or memory vignettes generated by other users. Brains are adaptive and can learn to process unfamiliar stimuli.

It's all far in the future and raises a lot of strange and worrisome questions, but it's interesting to think about.

It's nice that the paper is freely accessable to boot.

to be convenient: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130228/srep01319/full/srep01...

One observation, that the bbc didn't note, is that the decoder brain in the end had a representation of the encoder's whiskers.

To be a bit hyperbolic, the rat started to think it had two bodies. Or maybe it thought it had an extra set of whisker's some where. I can't quite imagine what the rat's body image would be.

I#m so utterly torn on this. On one hand, this sounds like the first step to a matrix-like learning tool - downloading information into the brain. And is in a nerdy way quite cool.

But on the other hand this totally creeps me out. I am disgusted, that something so possibly sinister is being researched. Something with such a potential for misuse.

After reading this quote: "We will have a way to exchange information across millions of people without using keyboards or voice recognition devices or the type of interfaces that we normally use today," he said.

I just thought:

"We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."

I wonder if this could have some great research applications. A year ago I watched some lectures from Stanford on ethobiology (i.e. the branch dealing with the biological processes underlying behavior) on YouTube by Robert Sapolsky, and he talked a lot about the difficulty of figuring out what parts of the brain (and which interplays of brain centers) are responsible for behavioral patterns, especially when it comes to the more complex things. One joke was something like: "You know that feeling when someone calls you and you don't really want to talk, but feel uncomfortable with saying that actually you're busy and would rather just read a book than talk? I think we've found the brain center for that." We have learned a lot from what happens when people have certain parts of their brains damaged. But maybe we could learn much, much more about the brain by being able to fiddle around with many different kinds of signals to different brain centers, and trying out hypotheses by stimulating several centers simultaneously in order to produce (or not produce) certain behaviors?

Reminds me Kevin Warwick's project. I take it both he and his wife implanted electrode arrays into arms (interfacing to a median nerve). And they've been able to perform simple communications. First direct and purely electronic communication between the nervous systems of two humans. It was done in 2002.

I'd be more impressed if they hadn't trained the second rat beforehand. The second rat may be perceiving the stimulus as anything - a pressure in it's tail, who knows? The second rat is trained to press a button when it feels a pressure in it's tail.

I just don't see a clear path from this to true 'communication' - unless it takes a form like morse code that one (human) mind taps out and the other (human) mind consciously decodes. But I know nothing about this either ;)

This is just the first step in a potential future that could be huge. The consequences of which could be so persuasive i'd almost question if we could still call ourselves human. Huge changes that could help Communication improve, and general intelligence improve. Think about how much time people waste simply trying to communicate their minds vision to each other. This literally could be the most effective form of communication. Additionally imagine if its not a person on the other end, but a computer with artificial intelligence. It would literally be like having Google built into your brain. That's the intelligence explosion. Of course, if only a select few people have it, the digital divide would be huge.

Reminds me of DARPA using the subconscious human brain as a peripheral for pattern recognition.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507826/sentry-system-co...

I wonder whay human brain clusters will be used for? Stock market analysis?

I know this isn't Slashdot, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them :)

> a way to exchange information across millions of people without using keyboards or voice recognition devices

Brain-to-brain communication will be convenient, because we won't need physical I/O devices. However, I wonder if there will be any advantage to interfacing any deeper into the brain than those corresponding nerves... that is, perhaps direct-brain interfaces will be pretty much like conventional I/O, just without the physical I/O device (like the cochlear implants/bionic eyes/bionic arms of today). So we can't improve fundamentally over things like google glass/MYO.

The reason I say this is because we already have brain-to-brain communication in the form of language. This involves reducing our internal representation (whatever it is) into a serial format that follows grammatical rules - not necessarily "proper" grammar, but sufficient to enable the recipient, using shared knowledge, to decode the meaning. This has striking parallels to network communication: we have the internal representation of data structures (e.g. objects), which are serialized to a low-level protocol (e.g. xml, json, yaml, protobuf, asn.1) which follows a higher-level grammar (explicit like xsd or implicit as in json). Well, not entirely surprising, since Chomsky's grammar hierarchy was based on human language.

The interesting question is whether brain-to-brain communication can be any more "direct" than the serial representation (language) we already have... That is, are our internal representations similar enough that they can be "directly" communicated; or are they so different between individuals that converting between them will amount to going through a common grammar in order to interface between them?

Favouring direct interface is the argument that serial representation was only needed to communicate over the distance to another human - i.e. because we didn't have direct brain-to-brain contact - and it is not needed apart from that. Also in favour of direct communication is that if individuals are reasoning about the same things in the same ways, our internal representations must be equivalent in some sense. Other hidden aspects of ourselves also turn out to have strong similarities (such as internal organs); and where they vary, they often vary in strong groups (such as blood types), so perhaps our hidden mental features will also be similar.

Against this is the observation that everyone's perspective is unique - literally, where their eyes are - but also of course their figurative perspective, resulting from cumulative experiences, genetic background, internal thoughts and randomly different wiring/interpretations. Therefore, we don't have the same internal models. We don't even have different models of the same reality, because we perceive reality differently - our models are of a different reality. And this diversity is one of the great creative strengths of our collective intelligence, that different people have different insights into the same problem. Another argument against this is that grammar is not only used in communicating to others, but is also used to communicate to ourselves - when we talk to ourselves, debate a course of action internally, "marshal our thoughts" into words. There's even an argument that the full power of human thought requires language - it's not just a serialization format, but is thought itself. By this view, even if we can communicate directly, it would only be associations, senses, emotions, recollections etc. We couldn't communicate an argument, for example.

SUMMARY our internal representations will differ at least to the extent that we interpret things differently (i.e. that we live in a different reality). We will probably fall into groups, like blood types; also by profession/training/personality/social group. i.e. between persons "on the same wavelength". This is a limit on how "directly" communicate, i.e. without requiring a shared intermediate general-purpose language.

tl;dr qualia

Few days back I read an article that the flower communicating to the bee. Now this. Mother Nature is awesome.

"Although the information was transmitted in real time, the learning process was not instantaneous. [It] takes about 45 days of training an hour a day, said Prof Nicolelis."

So much for Matrix learning style.