Telepathy on the Horizon: New Interface Allows Brain-to-Brain Communication
Ever wish you could read minds? While the technology to correctly call your poker buddies' bluffs still eludes us, researchers in the UK have shown that brain-to-brain communication is indeed possible. All you need is some electrodes, a computer, and an Internet connection. Brain-computer interfacing, or BCI, isn't new. Researchers have used computers to read signals from the brain before -- DARPA is sponsoring initiatives to use such technology to develop prosthetic limbs that respond to neural commands -- but Dr. Christopher James at the University of Southampton has taken BCI a step further, showing that person-to-person communication is possible through true brain-to-brain interfacing. In James's experiment, two people are hooked up to EEG amplifiers that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. The first person generates a series of zeros and ones, imagining moving his left are...