A man wears an EEG cap and stares into a computer screen as part of an experiment with brain-computer interfacing.

A man wears an EEG cap and stares into a computer screen as part of an experiment with brain-computer interfacing. Sybren Stuven via Flickr

Actual Telepathy Is One Step Closer to the Battlefield

Can you read my mind? Researchers announce first brain-to-brain communication without a surgical implant. By Patrick Tucker

Forget battlefield smartphones; the future of soldier-to-soldier communication may be electronic telepathy. A group of researchers in Europe have developed what they are calling the first “human brain-to-brain interface,” allowing people to communicate telepathically through the Internet without a surgical implant, bringing us closer to the day when soldiers behind enemy lines exchange information via sensors reading their thoughts.

The primarily Spanish researchers, who published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE, started with four participants between the ages of 28 and 50. One subject, called the emitter, was located in Thiruvananthapuram, India, and wore an electroencephalography (EEG) cap that could pick up the electromagnetic activity in his brain. The subject was asked to concentrate on moving an object on a screen vertically and horizontally. A computer picked up the signals and turned them into code to represent ones or zeroes. The subject was able, after training, to achieve 90 percent accuracy in creating these signals. The message was sent in email form to three blindfolded subjects in Strasbourg, France, via transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS.

This second group of subjects received a subtle jolt to the occipital lobe, a portion of the brain associated with sight, which caused them to experience phospenes, the sensation of perceiving light when none is present.

The end result was that a coded message was transferred, via a computer interface, between two brains without surgical implant – a historic first.

“In both cases, the transmitted pseudo-random sequences carried encrypted messages encoding a wordhola’ (‘hello’ in Catalan or Spanish) in the first transmission, ‘ciao’ (‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ in Italian) in the second,” the researchers write in the paper. They also report that the achieved an accuracy rate of 85 percent.

The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technology, or FET, program, funded the research, in part, out of a 2.7 million grant. FET is sometimes referred to as the European version of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It’s a program to support moonshot research at the earliest stages with a time horizon beyond what would be practical for a venture capitalist or a private investor. The current research certainly falls within the category of ambitious beyond practical. But synthetic telepathy has, in fact, been part of the right-around-the-corner future for decades.

It’s also an area that the United States military has been researching for years, beginning in 1967 when Edmond M. Dewan, affiliated with the defunct Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, published this paper in the journal Nature showing that human subjects could train themselves to emit Alpha waves (electromagnetic brain waves between 8 and 12 hz) in Morse code.

In 2008, the U.S. Army gave researchers from UC Irvine, the University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University a $4 million grant to create what was then dubbed “synthetic telepathy,” or a system to translate brain signals configured as code between the helmets of soldiers. 

The Spanish researchers’ breakthrough moves that concept much closer to reality but the method that the researchers describe in their paper is extremely slow. The electronic pops and cackles that your brain emits when you visualize movement aren’t really speech, after all, and don’t lend themselves easily to the exchange of words or ideas, and certainly not complex ones. It’s something that University of Wisconsin researcher Adam Wilson discovered in April of 2009 when he used EEG to post an update to Twitter. “You have to press a button four times to get the character you want… So this is kind of a slow process at first,” he remarked.

“I think that in practical terms the main obstacles for non-invasive [brain-to-brain communication] technology is we still don’t understand where the limit is, how far beyond the simple, slow transmission of sensations we can go. It is hard to give a window, but if obstacles are overcome, something practical could be achieved around in 30 years,” Giulio Ruffini, one of the PLOS ONE study’s co-authors told Defense One.

In the meantime, the military could achieve a similar effect with so-called invasive implants, or sensors that have been surgically implanted in a subject. The closer the sensor is to the source of the electromagnetic activitythe brainthe clearer the signal will be.

“Invasive solutions can in principle be much more powerful. But their nature precludes wide applications. You’d have to introduce implants in people’s brains,” said Ruffini. He puts the arrival date for synthetic telepathy via surgical means closer to twenty years away.

But recent research suggests he may be under-estimating the speed of progress.

The proof of concept for surgically-embedded communication implants extends back to 2002, when artificial intelligence and cybernetics researcher Kevin Warwick spent three months with an implant connected to his peripheral nervous system via his arm. In one experiment, he hooked his implant to the Internet and then sent signals to electrodes that he had implanted in his wife’s arm. He described the experiment to ITWALES.com in 2006. “[W]hen she moved her hand three times, I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me. It was the world's first purely electronic communication from brain to brain, and therefore the basis for thought communication."

Ruffini says that Warwick's experiment is not brain-to-brain communication because it's mediated by the peripheral nervous systems with the hand serving as an intermediary. 

Brain-to-brain communication over the Internet may never be the best solution for the battlefield, despite the millions of dollars of Pentagon research money that’s gone into exploring it. But the military may achieve interesting results with direct brain control over machinery, as several German researchers recently demonstrated via an experiment where subjects successfully steered simulated aircraft via an EEG interface. The commercial market for brain-based gaming systems, such as the NeuroSky console, while still small, has grown quickly enough to support multiple conferences and Kickstarter campaigns in just the last three years. Today, these systems are faddish at best but if their makers can overcome the frustration factor and design some fun into them, then the body of useful data about EEG signaling may take off as quickly as the Nintendo 64 in 1996.

Brain-to-brain communication interfaces could arrive before many researchers’ expectations. So keeping your thoughts to yourself just got a little harder. 

NEXT STORY: Four Questions for NATO's Leaders

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.