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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.
Like the 3 pre-cogs in Minority Report https://fsmedia.imgix.net/cb/0...
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.
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.
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.
Let me think of a way to say this gently... you're an idiot. I think I failed. Sorry. Telepathy as generally defined by people is Not Real. Nor is homeopathy. Nor god. You can come up with a vague general sort of something that might pass for telepathy that you could claim was real, but the thing the common man calls telepathy does not exist. Thank you for your attention.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
I do not post often because I am paralyzed.
Typing is a multi-hour exercise in eyebrow twitches.
Most people do not have the patience to hold a conversation with me. I wish I could shorten that word to 'talk' as it would mean fewer eyebrow twitches.
I would give all of my mod points to be able to mind-meld with other paralyzed people and 'talk' at a normal rate. Please support this research.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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".
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)
No, not really. It looked to me like they were sharing a basic set of signals.
We already know you can upload and download high bandwidth data, but we also know sharing memories wouldn't work because they're not stored that way.
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.
Not really.
First, wrong sort of data.
Second, it is data, not a control signal.
Third, brains don't work in a way that would support a Borg-like arrangement.
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)
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)
Humans can do this without the machinery
Sure they can. We have a clever built-in biologic mechanism to transform brain activity into almost unnoticeable air vibrations, and another clever mechanism to transform minute air vibrations back into brain activity.
Problem is of course, most people are not really aware of this mechanism and aren't properly attuned to it, so they emit mostly nonsense and often also fail to properly pick up the thoughts other people try to share with them. It is said that the ancients were much better at it, which is why their world was so much less violent. It would be great if we could train young people to get better at using these mechanisms, but I guess that's why too fruity for most politicians.
The weirdest thing is, you can even use a clever device (called a tele-phone, from fter the greek for remote + air vibrations) to then transform these air vibrations into electric pulses, send them all across the world, and (in)directly connect the brains of people half a world apart!. It's magic! (Or at least indistinguishable from it!)
Because of course it's completely impossible for someone who is paralysed to have not been paralysed in the past...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Are you aware of the challenge put forth by James Randy for $1 million to prove the viability of such a claim? It does require you to pass a double blind test to prove it works.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
The James Randi prize is no longer on offer, unfortunately.
This was not "connecting" brains, they used EEGs. If that's connecting brains, then so would touching fingertips, using a mobile phone to call someone, etc.
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.
You get a division by zero error and the Pointy Haired Boss is created in actual meatspace.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
So this it the first step in assimilating.
I say there's a lot of things that science cannot know and even doesn't want to know.
IAAS, and I will be the first to admit that science does not, and cannot, know everything.
However, science is indisputably the best tool that humans have developed to understand the universe.
Even in the hard sciences, if it's not already established it gets labeled "pseudoscience" saving everyone the bother of looking at it, and that's no way to learn anything truly new. So I say it's science that's the culprit here.
To challenge 'established' science, you need only provide evidence. What gets labeled 'pseudoscience' is sloppy, dishonest work that doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Science is not the culprit that stands in the way of new knowledge. Ignorance is.
Scientists are humans, and humans have a finite time on this earth. Yes, they endeavor to be open-minded, but they are not obliged to suffer fools who spout nonsense.
So if there's something here, then science is going to have to be more open minded than it's been in the last decades by several orders of magnitude before it'll have half a chance to discover the thing. Unless it gets flat-out forced into some new reality, of course, but those happenings are rare. Proper application of the scientific method can do it, iff you know where to look. "Science" as we currently conceive the notion, cannot, because it doesn't even try to look.
Wow. Just about everything in this paragraph is wrong.
Science is open-minded. All you need to make your case is evidence and a rational analysis of it. Can scientists be stubborn? Of course. They're human. But eventually evidence-based truth wins. Scientific revolutions can take time to happen. To quote physicist Max Planck: "Science advances one funeral at a time." And in the broad arc of its history, it never stops looking.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
You seen to have misapplied the magnets.
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"?
"Telepathy as generally defined by people is Not Real. Nor is homeopathy. Nor god."
Proof?
For homeopathy, it seems there is proof. For telepathy, I doubt anyone practicing it dare let it be known.
But, for God, you have proof God does not exist?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, I think the first person to come up with a consistent and viable use for telepathy will make millions, regardless. They don't need Randi to justify going public.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
which is why their world was so much less violent
lol-fucking-what?