At the University of Washington (UW), two researchers may have experienced the first ever brain-to-brain interaction when one told the other what to do from across campus, according to a news release.
Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal via Internet across the UW campus to Andrea Stocco, who involuntarily pressed a button on a keyboard. The researchers believe it is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface ever completed.
Researchers at Duke University performed a brain interface between rats and Harvard scientists were able to complete one between a human and a rat.
"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."
In one room, Rao played a computer game using only his mind and, in another across campus, Stocco reacted with a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of the brain. Rao sent an electrical brain recording and caused Stocco to involuntarily hit the button to "fire."
Rao, a UW computer science and engineering professor, teamed up with Stocco, a research assistant professor of psychology, in 2011. Rao had been working on brain-to-computer interface for ten years and had published a textbook on the matter before beginning this experiment.
Rao sat in a chair motionless and had to imagine himself hitting the "fire" button for a computer game, but it was important he not actually move his hand. Stocco, who wore noise-cancelling earplugs when his finger hit the button, compared the feeling to a nervous tic, totally involuntary.
"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said. "This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains."
Chantel Prat, Stocco's wife and research partner at UW, assisted with the experiment and said some might not be as excited for the team's results. She said brain-computer interface research has been around for a long time.
"I think some people will be unnerved by this because they will overestimate the technology," Prat said. "There's no possible way the technology that we have could be used on a person unknowingly or without their willing participation."
