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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.
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.
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
Easy! A three way is a switching device with 3 connectors instead of 2. You typically use 2 of those devices to be able to turn on the light downstairs and turn it off once you get upstairs. 4 way switches exist as well although they are rarer.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
Most women claim to have been doing this throughout human history.
Tetris was created in June 1984. Fucking millennials.