Interspecies telepathy: human thoughts make rat move
Telepathic control
of another person's body is a small step closer. By linking the
technologies of two brain/computer interfaces, human volunteers were
able to trigger movement in a rat's tail using their minds.
Recently, researchers linked the brains of two rats so that they worked together to accomplish a task.
Such techniques are unlikely to be applied to humans any time soon
because they require invasive surgery to implant electrodes into the
brain.
Now Seung-Schik Yoo
of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues have created a
system that connects a human to a rat via a computer, without the need
for the human or the rat to have brain implants.
The human volunteers wore electrode
caps that monitored their brain activity using electroencephalography
(EEG). Meanwhile, an anaesthetised rat was hooked up to a device that
made the creature's neurons fire whenever it delivered an ultrasonic
pulse to the rat's motor cortex.
Feeling twitchy
When monitoring the human's brain
activity, the researchers looked for a specific EEG pattern known to
correspond to visual stimulation. As the volunteers watched a strobe light
blinking on a computer screen, the EEG wave synchronised to match the
frequency of the strobe (see the "SSVEP" line on video, above).
But when they switched to
concentrating on moving the rat's tail, the change in their focus
disrupted the EEG, triggering a signal to be sent to the computer. The
computer translated this signal into an ultrasonic pulse, which
stimulated the rat's motor cortex, causing its tail to move. Using this
system, all six of the volunteers were able to trigger movement in the
rat's tail with little difficulty.
Yoo says it should be possible for two
humans to use a similar system in the foreseeable future. Such a system
could, for instance, be used to help a paralysed person relearn to use
their limbs by having their therapist initially move them with their
mind.
Reality check
But Ricardo Chavarriaga
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and
others say that while the experiment is an interesting application of
the two technologies, linking them together does not reveal much about
the ability to link two brains.
Because the rat was anaesthetised to
isolate the effect of the intervention, he says it is not clear that the
experiment realistically models what would happen if a conscious brain
was stimulated this way.
More importantly, Chavarriaga says,
the experiment will not be meaningful until the human's intention
corresponds with the rat's action. For instance, a person might imagine
moving their left hand to move the rat's left paw. Yoo's approach would
not be of any use for that because it only tells us that a person's
mental focus has changed, not what the thought or sensation behind the
change is.
Yoo says his group is working on this
now, testing other brain activity patterns and monitoring technologies
that may convey more information about a person's thoughts and
sensations.
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