In some seriously sci-fi tech news, scientists have officially transmitted brain stimulus from one person to another across the internet. This was the second test of the technology by researchers at the University of Washington. The first was conducted last year, and now that it has been replicated, they say it is much closer to a deliverable product.
For the study, researchers took a control group of people who had no previous training and isolated them in pairs. One volunteer was the sender and one the receiver, separated by about a half-mile. The sender was hooked up to an electroencephalography machine and was instructed to watch a video game that requires the user to fire a missile. The receiver was fitted with an electrode-covered swim cap and given the controller for the video game that they couldn’t see. The sender was then able to control the receiver volunteers hand to play the game just by thinking about it.
The results varied between 25-83% accuracy in their trials, and failures were mostly chalked up to the senders not properly executing the fire command at the right time.
There’s still plenty of research to be done before this technology is commonplace, but scientists hope that one day it will be used for everything from alerting a co-pilot about a captain’s fatigue to professors just uploading knowledge to a student’s brain. Whoa.
(Photo: Leesean)
