An Indian professor at University of Washington in Seattle and his American research colleague have successfully performed the first non-invasive human-to-human brain interface over the Internet.
Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh PN Rao, Associate Professor of Computer and Science Engineering, sent a brain signal to researcher Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.
While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing, said a UW announcement.
“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.”
The university released a demonstration video in which Rao is shown playing a computer game with his mind. And Stocco, wearing a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain, was seen moving the right index finger involuntarily to hit the “fire” button.
Rao has been working on brain-computer interfacing for more than 10 years. He has just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, an assistant professor in psychology.
For the demonstration, the team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the screens.
“It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said, noting: “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.”
On his home page on the university website, Rao says the primary goal of his research is “to discover the computational principles underlying the brain’s remarkable ability to learn, process and store information, and to apply this knowledge to the task of building adaptive robotic systems and brain-human interfaces”.