What on the surface appeared to be a simple question-and-answer game was actually the first successful attempt by scientists to create a technology-assisted Vulcan mind meld, allowing the brains of two individuals to send and receive signals to one another over the Internet.
This feat of science-based mind-reading was made possible by researchers from the University of Washington, who used a direct brain-to-brain connection, allowing the game’s participants to accurately guess what the other one was thinking of at any given time.
Andrea Stocco, lead author of a paper detailing the research that was published in the latest issue of PLOS One, called it “the most complex brain-to-brain experiment… done to date in humans. It uses conscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually,” the assistant professor of psychology added, “and it requires two people to collaborate.”
One heck of a “Guess Who” game
Stocco, who is also a researcher at the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, explained in a statement that the experiments required one participant (the respondent) to wear a cap that had been connected to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine that records brain activity.
That individual is then shown an object on a computer screen, while the second participant (the inquirer) is presented with a list of possible objects and associated questions. The inquirer sends a question to the respondent, who then answered “yes” or “no” by focusing on one of two flashing LED light attached to the monitor, each of which flashed at different frequencies.
While both answers send a signal to the inquirer via the Internet, activating a magnetic coil placed behind this individual’s head, only an affirmative answer was able to generate an intense enough response for the visual cortex to be stimulated. This allowed the inquirer to see a flash of light called a phosphene created through a brief disruption in the visual field. Using this system, the inquirer was ultimately able to identify which object the other person was looking at.
The experiments were conducted in dark rooms located in two labs nearly one mile apart, Stocco and her colleagues explained. Five pairs of participants each played 20 rounds of the Q&A game, each of which involved eight objects and three questions that would provide the solution if they were answered correctly. The researchers also said that they “took many steps to make sure that people were not cheating,” including using earplug to limit what inquirers could hear.
Objects correctly identified nearly 3/4 of the time
Participants were able to correctly guess the object in 72 percent of the games, compared to just 18 percent in similar, control games. The UW researchers said that incorrect guesses could have been due to several factors, including uncertainty about whether or not a phosphene had actually appeared, or by a brain signal transmissions being interrupted by hardware failure.
“They have to interpret something they’re seeing with their brains. It’s not something they’ve ever seen before,” said co-author Chantel Prat, an associate professor of psychology at UW as well as a member of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. “While the flashing lights are signals that we’re putting into the brain, those parts of the brain are doing a million other things at any given time too.”
“Evolution has spent a colossal amount of time to find ways for us and other animals to take information out of our brains and communicate it to other animals in the forms of behavior, speech and so on, But it requires a translation,” Stocco added. “What we are doing is kind of reversing the process a step at a time by opening up this box and taking signals from the brain and with minimal translation, putting them back in another person’s brain.”
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Feature Image: University of Washington
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