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Scientists Connect the Brains of Three People, Allowing Thought-Sharing (sciencealert.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert:
Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts -- and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.
The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.... For now it's very slow and not fully reliable, and this work has yet to be peer-reviewed by the neuroscience community, but it's a glimpse at some fanciful ways we could be getting our thoughts across to each other in the future -- maybe even pooling mental resources to try and tackle major problems. "Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a 'social network' of connected brains," writes the team.
The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.... For now it's very slow and not fully reliable, and this work has yet to be peer-reviewed by the neuroscience community, but it's a glimpse at some fanciful ways we could be getting our thoughts across to each other in the future -- maybe even pooling mental resources to try and tackle major problems. "Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a 'social network' of connected brains," writes the team.
It's a bit on the easy side, because it's aimed towards youth, but in those books people get connected via a small chip in the nose and it has interestingly bad effects the more people get connected.
Research into linking paralyzed people to speech synthesizers and robot arms has already achieved some success. Humans can do both and patients have had limited speech and limited mobility restored by this technology.
I hope the research continues, progresses and becomes affordable to those who need it.
We have long passed the point where suffering from such conditions is inevitable and are at the point where it's now a matter of degree and of economics.
Some day, even those limitations may be overcome.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)