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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.
The last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. We now have the technology against the impending Kaiju attacks.
Wait, how does a nuclear reactor get used as a nuclear bomb again?
We will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Just think of the ways this could enhance our sex lives. I mean for those who have one of those these days.
Like the 3 pre-cogs in Minority Report https://fsmedia.imgix.net/cb/0...
It's been about 6 decades or the average human life expectancy, since the first experiments trying this were done. Here we have a glimmer that it might actually be possible in the next 2-3 decades.
When you compare it to how long it took humans to achieve stable flight, it's not so bad.
Did I just say telepathy is real? Yes, yes it is and I know this from first-hand experience. Extremely weak and untrained experience, just barely enough to know it is indeed possible, but yes, it's first-hand. So if these eggheads managed to make brain-to-brain communication happen through machinery, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually people will find they'll no longer need the machinery. Some sooner than others, of course.
More troubling is that this also means influencing one's brain from machinery is possible and indeed workable. So you can have your computer talk directly to your brain, but so can other people, possibly people organised into large groups like governments or corporations, including people whose agenda might not be quite amendable to yours. So yes, these wonderfully talented and accomplished science people just opened a large can of ethics worms. Fun times ahead for everyone.
I doubt most of the scientists I’ve met would even know what a three-way is.
#DeleteChrome
Who knew the Borg were born from a communal game of Tetris?
It's called talking. We've been doing it for a long time.
Free Software developers of the world, open your eyes! Our communities are being raped, our work pillaged.
Detestable villains - thieving, mean spirited, belligerent, racist, unprincipled - are using underhanded tricks to force hypocritical "Codes of Conduct" on the projects we built.
These petty-authoritarian CoCs are always imposed anti-democratically. There is never free debate, and usually no public discussion at all. They are imposed by force without a vote. If the CoCs were put up for a fair democratic vote by project contributors, they would always lose by a landslide.
The purpose of these CoCs is to allow so-called "Progressives", who have contributed nothing to the project, to conduct witch hunts against anyone who opposes their hate-driven agenda. Thereby they plan to steal our work for their shadowy corporate paymasters.
You can readily tell these CoCs are not about "just being nice" - because they are ALWAYS supported by the very LEAST NICE, most aggressively mean and shamelessly bigoted people you can imagine. Look how the CoC-mongers treat anyone who disagrees with them as subhuman.
If a project to which you contribute has been raped by CoC-mongers there is a simple solution: WALK AWAY. Never contribute again. If you have a patch almost ready, count the time you spent on it as a loss and throw it away. If you see a security issue, remain silent and do nothing. IT'S NO LONGER YOUR PROJECT. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME THERE.
If you are evaluating new software, don't even consider any projects burdened under the tyranny of a CoC. Their technical attributes do not matter - just don't consider them. Never be openly political, always make up a technical reason for rejecting CoCed projects.
Don't argue in public about the CoC. Doing so only exposes you to needless risk. You might be dis-employed, blackballed, and even set up for a #MeToo purge. Just stay far away. If you resign from a project that gets CoCed, try to do so on the same day the CoC is imposed. But give "spend more time with friends & family" or "pursue other intests & projects" as your reason for resignation. Protect yourself!
Comrades: Individually we are powerless, and easily crushed beneath the iron boot of Corporate Social Just-Us. But together in solidarity we are millions and we are strong. The Internet itself depends on our collective labor. If we stop working, the internet stops working.
Free Software developers, save yourselves and save your communities! Just WALK AWAY from any project with a CoC. Without our labor they are nothing.
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.
What do you bet they're not building encryption and security protocols into the system while it's in its infancy? All the better for government and big business to more easily monitor and control us when the technology catches on.
Just watch the participants at the staged "Trump" rallies. No plugins or wire necessary there. If the adage "great minds think alike" is a truism then it is also true that people with shit for brains are equally capable of thinking alike.
This is how we start down the path of the Borg instead of the Federation. Do you want to be a drone? Because this is how you become a drone.
Some politician is probably thinking of a way to tax this new way to communicate.
A FCC transmission fee.
We know you rent liar.
but the computer kept saying "waiting for third brain"
Why they not connect bowels of three people for feces sharing ?
Not quite as impressive once you read the details of what they actually did instead of the hyped up title and summary that makes it sounds like they are reading each other's minds.
If you put three managers in this, do you get one brain or zero?
in 100 years or so when it actually works, some guy is going to get sued for sexual harassment because he forgot to turn it off when he started thinking about a coworker in an inappropriate way.
"Wretched is the body which depends on a body, and wretched is the soul which depends on these two."
I'll be getting the optimal implementation from the Designer, long before this random kluge gets to beta with a pathetic subset of functionality.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
They weren't sharing thoughts. They were sharing a signal. Specifically, an LED which, they were told before the experiment, represents a move in Tetris. They aren't communicating anything of great depth, the government can't use this to read your thoughts and find out that you ran a red light on the way home last night. The whole thing could literally have been replaced with two wires. Typical web jabber that sometimes pretends to be "journalism".
I'd much rather share orgasms. Thought sort of spoils it.
Christopher Dale Reimer (aka creimer, The Original CDR, etc.) has been identified by JSOC as a Russian troll.
The Reimer family is typically from the Eastern part of Germany and it has been found that Chris have maintained contacts with homeland influencial people.
I would like to point out that East Germany was communist and controlled by Russia (CCCP) before Ronald Reagan took them apart.
In the experiment set up by the scientists, two 'senders' were connected to EEG electrodes and asked to play a Tetris-style game involving falling blocks. They had to decide whether each block needed rotating or not.
To do this, they were asked to stare at one of two flashing LEDs at either side of the screen – one flashing at 15 Hz and the other at 17 Hz – which produced different signals in the brain that the EEG could pick up on.
How difficult could be to scale up such a setup? You can just keep adding LEDs for every existing concept/action/character, each of them flashing at a different frequency and there you have a perfect transmission of "thoughts". People using that system might have to be trained during some years and need some suicide-prevention help, but how could science evolve without some sacrifices? LOL. Seriously now, I think that calling all this "thought sharing" is at best being tremendously imprecise. Also expecting this approach to be eventually able to deal with complex (or better: actual) thoughts or actions seems impossible.
One thing is measuring brain activity while performing very specific actions to see certain variations (= what is being done here); by bearing in mind that this doesn't imply understanding of what is going on, not even uniqueness of the given signal. A completely different story is getting any kind of tangible version of what might be considered thoughts and, for that, we would still need to know how the thinking process even happens. Long story short, all this kind of brain-activity measurement actions just try to find regular patterns within intrinsically meaningless signals.
Reading articles of this sort makes me feel a bit of sorry for (a big proportion of) the scientific community. Firstly, they are systematically forced to mostly work on projects aiming to accomplish directly-marketable/apparently-appealing goals, perhaps only for pretty ignorant individuals whose "knowledge" is mostly formed by sci-fi movies and ideas like "scaling up can be easily applied everywhere", otherwise they don't get any funding. Then, they are pushed to quickly deliver tangible results, again under equivalently stupid conditions. Finally, all their efforts are usually undermined or put completely out of context via a tabloid-like promotion to keep/get more funding. On the other hand, everyone should accept the consequences of their (non-)actions. For example, my principles (honesty, fairness, integrity) are the most important thing to me and I know that nothing will ever change that (much less something with so little-value-to-me like money or generic, not-well-deserved recognition). So, I guess that it is a matter of what the goals of everyone are and what they are willing to do to accomplish them. In any case, it does seem kind of sad, at least this is how it looks from my external and quite comfortable position.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Wasn't this demoed on the unfinished Doctor Who episode Shada?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bm...
Bet Skagra was on the engineering team.
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)
The brain consists of incredibly sophisticated networks on neurons (and glia), that perform the information processing that probably leads to thoughts. The resolution of transcranial stimulation, and the knowledge of the targeted brain regions, are both too low to call this sharing thoughts. Tell me you can do multi-point m scale read/write transcranially, know the anatomy of the targets brain region in m scale in a non-destructive way, and we can talk about "thought sharing" (or even thought insertion).
This *headline* oversells the results, and underestimates the complexity. It's nothing but bait.
But its good that they are messing about with it. Maybe one day thought sharing will be possible.
$subject
Those Borg babies...they're so cute when they're young.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
So how long before precrime units start wiring up precogs this way?
-- Alastair
"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."
It's called a MAGA hat.
A human brain is a colony of billions of neurons. BILLIONS! The only reason you can function is a person is because these neurons are networked together, and don't act independently.
These are the very two reasons that we are a higher form of life than simple molds, or single-celled organisms. We are BORG!
The further direct networking of human brains is just a re-iteration of the same pattern. It isn't some horrible thing like how it was depicted in Star Trek. We fear it because we see it as a threat to our individuality, and we have instincts that drive us to fear that. But objectively there is nothing to fear. We all become part of a greater being, just as each cell in our brains is already a part of a greater being.
It is the future. It only seems weird to those too dim to see.
There are enough voices in my head, thank you very much.
A real life analogy to Promiscuous Mode.
So this it the first step in assimilating.
Great. Next steps will be: refining this so that thoughts can be interpreted and documented, then being able to do it wirelessly, then wirelessly over distances of, say, a few hundred meters. Then nosy corporations and governments can spy on what you're thinking in your own home, closing off the 'last mile' of individual privacy. We'll have to get Faraday cages installed where we live to even keep our thoughts private. Then Amazon will come out with a 'digital assistant' that gets thoughts via just thinking at it, and all the morons of the world who want the NEW SHINY will buy them -- and no one anywhere will ever have privacy again.
No, I'm not being funny. You know damned well that government intelligence services mouths are watering at the thought of being able to sift people's thoughts.
Most women claim to have been doing this throughout human history.
'social network' of connected brains
That already exists, and is known as human societies. Media is speech, written text, and other non verbal signals.
I can't wait until they start beaming adverts directly into your head whilst you are trying to get to sleep!
>/dev/null 2>&1
Specifically 1994's "Dead at 21"?