Imagine a day when all human brains will be connected in a massive network. According to an article in Popular Mechanics by Sarah Fecht, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis sees this coming, and he calls this network the brain-net.
Nicolelis works at Duke University, and in his lab he has been working towards brain-to-brain communication.
Nicolelis has been doing experiments with rats by electronically connecting their brains. His experiments involve two thirsty rats. First he places them into separate, identical cages. Neither rat can see or hear the other. He then wires the brains of the rats together using electrode implants.
Nicolelis trains the rats to push a lever on a cue, when a light flashes above the correct lever. If rat No. 1 pushes the correct lever, then it is rewarded with some water. This only works if the rat sees the cue. So in order for rat No. 2 to get some water, it needs to read the thoughts of rat No.1.
So when the left light flashes in rat No.1’s cage, it will then push the left lever. When rat No. 1 does this, neurons in its motor cortex fire, and the electrode implant collects this information, turns it into binary code, and then sends this signal to the electrode in rat No. 2’s brain. When the electrode in rat No. 2 receives this signal, it converts the binary code back to a neural signal, which then tells rat No. 2 to push the left lever, just as the rat No. 1 did.
With the information given by rat No. 1, rat No. 2 pushed the correct lever 85 percent of the time.
The rats continued to communicate with each other telepathically, even after they were separated. One rat remained in North Carolina, while the other was in Brazil.
The signal was no longer sent through a wire though. It was now traveling through the Internet, so they did see delays in the signal during experiments.
Could this be the future of communication? Will we all be turning in our devices for telepathy?
“We already have the technology to do this sort of brain-to-brain communication. It’s a bit crude, but we could do it,” says Christopher James, a biomedical engineer who studies brain-machine interfaces at the University of Warwick.
Wednesday, June 25, 2025