3 People Can Share Thoughts Via Connected Brains

Scientists have recently connect 3 brains and allow 3 volunteers to give and receive each other’s thoughts to play a game in Tetris style. The success of this experiment may lead to a future of many connections between people networks, and yes this idea may sound a little bit weird.

Brain's activities create shocks

If you are wondering how this can happen, here is the answer: a complex of EEGs (electroencephalograms) is created to record the electrical shocks coming from brain’s activities, and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), stimulating neurons functions with magnetic fields.

This system, whose name is BrainNet, is believed to be able to link various different brains, even via the Internet. However, beside the introduction of the new communication methods via brain activities, BrainNet has also shown us the deeper levelled activities of the brains.

The neuroscientists who have worked on the project stated that before BrainNet, there was no multi-person non-invasive brain-to-brain system to solve problems cooperatively. The appearance of this interface gives three people a way to solve a problem together with the direct communication from brain to brain.

First approaches

In the experiment, the researchers sent volunteers into a Tetris-style game, where they had to deal with falling blocks, while connected to EEGs. The volunteers must decide if they should rotate any block.

In order to complete the challenge, the subjects needed to look closely at two flashing LEDs of one screen, but at 2 different sides: 15 Hz flashing and 17 Hz one. Each type of flash would produce a distinguish signal in the brain, and then the EEG system would notice that. The reactions then would go to the receiver through phosphenes.

Then he or she could rotate the block without seeing the game area. After doing the experiment with 15 volunteers, divided into 5 groups, the scientists draw out an average of 81.25%, which is a pretty good proportion.

To make the game more complicated, the scientists added a function to make the senders able to give feedback for the receiver, noticing if they had called correctly. Then, the receivers, with the information gaining from the brain connection only, could decide which senders was more trustworthy.

The scientists could then concluded that this result could be the future of the world where lies and trust-problem are now big issues. And although the amount of data that the system can carry is only a ‘bit’- or a flash at a team, the scale of the experiment is going to increase, according to the research team, coming from Carnegie Mellon University and University of Washington.

Further experiments

They have also succeeded in connecting 2 brains, and set the volunteers up in 20 question games where participants had to compete. One more time, the same types of flashes were there in order to send signals, in this circumstance, are “yes” and “no”.

The development now is gradually increasing and not entirely noticeable, and scientists should do further examinations before drawing the final conclusion. But this proved to be a good indicator that we can pass and get thoughts from each other- in order to join others in some brain activities and problem-solving cases.

The team wrote that their results showed that there was a possibility of brain-to-brain interface in the future that could serve as a problem solving tool with brain-connected function. Up to present, we can have access to the research on the arViv pre-print online.