Brain-to-Brain: The Science of Techno-Telepathy

might have pre existing health conditions. I mean, you just warned them that they might get cramps and nosebleeds, mild nosebleeds. I mean, we're not gonna catch anybody on fire or anything. What about their mental health? What about their privacy, the right, the right of freedom of thought and the deliberate communication. Well, that's not what this experiment is about. And that isn't even touched on the fact that you can scan their

smartphones and laptops with your mind. I mean, that's not quite as bad as peering into their private thoughts, dreams, and fears. But nobody wants that either. Geez Robert, I was really looking forward to this, and I have to report that you are now being a major buzz kill. Hey, I'm sorry, I knew you are. I know you are a bit of a migraine forming here. Okay, I'm good. That's a close one. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm

Joe McCormick. And if you haven't guessed already, today we're going to be talking about telepathy scanning, as it's often called in the literature. Yes, yes, I imagine a number of you identified our homage there to uh to David Cronenberg's sci fi classics Scanners. You know, what I found out just this week is that Scanners has a huge catalog of sequels that was unaware of. I knew there was a Scanners too that's got some corrupt police commissioner

with an army of Scanners. But there's a Scanners three that has a scene where a woman makes a pigeon blow up with her mind. And then I had no idea about this until you told me. But there's a spinoff series called Scanner Cop Scanner Cop one and then Scanner Cop two, which is also sometimes essentially Scanners forward, depending on which a version of the release you're looking at.

You know, one of the funny things about the development of the Scanners series, at least as far as I can tell, I haven't watched all of the movies, that most of the sequels look quite bad. But there is a sort of slow development or escalation of the powers

that are attributed to Scanners. I can remember in the first movie, you can read somebody's thoughts, and you can also sort of I think, plant implant thoughts to a certain extent um, and then of course you can cause the resident for frequency cascade that makes their head blow up, right, and I think you can make fire, and you can you can. Oh well, then also there's at least a um I don't want to give too many spoilers, but it's at least mentioned that you might be able to

absorb another individual's mind state into your own. Okay, so that's pretty godline. It's getting pretty weird even in the first movie. But later on you add what would conventionally be called telekinesis where you're throwing things around, you throw people across the room, So you're just generally developing psychic powers. Yeah, it goes into that realm of essentially magic. Yeah, pan

psychic sorcery. But telepathy is something that I can understand why that happens, because it's a concept that I thought. I think it's been interpreted in various ways that are often quite vague. So as much as I hate to go to the dictionary at the beginning of a discussion, I do think it's helpful to get a specified common definition on the table for telepathy, and I want to go with one included a mere Iriam Webster, which it just says communication from one mind to another by extra

sensory means. So I think that's what we're gonna be talking about today. It's sharing ideas. It's communication without using any of the senses, because we're using our our senses and our our language abilities or vocal abilities. Right now, we're engaging in a in a communication, in a communal thought process. Yeah, Like right now, a man walks into a bar and there's a duck on the bar. I just put that image into your head. I just put that image into everyone's head. I essentially use my scanner

powers on everyone listening to this podcast. But there was a fidelity copying problem there because when I pictured in my brain, what I pictured was a swan there, and that sort of gets to the basic problem of communication.

One of the reasons we often imagine the idea of telepathy as we defined it for the purpose of this episode communication without words or any of the normal sensory means, is that those normal canonical means of communication are highly flawed, like our ability to use them is far from perfect. Just think how often there's a conflict in your life because somebody took something that you said or wrote the wrong way, or because or because you don't know how

to interpret what somebody has said or wrote. If only you could truly understand what their intentions and feelings about the subject really were without everything being garbled through this language transmission mediator, then then things would seem to be a lot easier, right, Yeah, I mean, there's a study that came out earlier this year talking about how there I think they were mainly looking at, you know, situations between spouses where individuals have known each other for an

extended period of time, they've they have this this this long relationship and this collaboration going on, and you would think, oh, well, they're they've been they've been together so long, they totally understand each other. They can totally read each other's intents, and they know what the other person wants and values.

But this particular study found there was kind of the the opposite into many cases, because you end up having an idea in your head of what that other individual wants and needs, and it need not actually be accurate, but you're no longer feeling it out as much anymore, because it's if you feel like it's written in stone. Yeah, like everything you say, because I know you, I'm interpreting

through the lens of what I think about Robert. So even though all you said was, hey can you can you grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I'm thinking, why is he asking for a Satanic ritual? Yeah? Yeah, there's just so much that can that can become lost and ambiguous and just misinterpreted entirely. Of course, most of us are familiar with telepathy from fiction. That's how we started off with an example from a a fictional sci

fi horror movie. Uh uh, And and certainly fiction gives us plenty of wonderful, rich examples uh and some more thoughtful than others. Yeah. Yeah, of course, there's like the shining in the Shining, you know, the title of the Shining refers to this this sort of telepathic ability, though

it seems to extend beyond just communication telepathy. It is more just like we've mentioned earlier, the general psychic awareness, being able to sense things that are beyond what we can normally see with our see or here since is, Yes, they have a censury. It's like they have a sensory ability that everyone has, but there's this amped up to an incredible level, so they're constantly bombarded with the signals. You can finally hear the red rum resolve from the

background noise. Yeah. Another one that comes to my mind is I assume you've seen The Dark Crystal, right, and do you remember the Guelfling dream fast in that vaguely? That's uh, that's when Jin and Kira, I believe you have the two Gelflings meet and I sort of they kind of have this mind meld moment where they share visions of their childhood, right, they share their memories. It's seems like it's been a while since I've seen the movie,

but it is a great movie. And what I remember is that they just sort of download their memories directly from one another, so you can suddenly remember the other one's life. Another one, of course, is box vol can mind meld and start trek And that seems also kind of like the dream fast from what I recalled that it's not just like a single coded message being traded between minds, but it's like I've got your consciousness in me now? Yeah? Is that? Is that pretty much right? Yeah?

I believe so, it's it's it's been houstine. I've seen any track with actual mind melding moments. But yeah, alright, well a few that came to my mind. Well, first of all, I was wondering, do you think that the spice orgies and doone count There's it's not directly mentioned as I recall that, and I could be wrong on this, that there's a telepathic link. And certainly I think the

spice is going to affect individuals and you know, varying levels. Well, this is a problem I've read about in some of the skeptical rich you're on telepathy is that it's difficult to tell the difference between different types of extrasensory perception that people have claimed. So how can you tell the functional difference between telepathy and precognition or telepathy and clairvoyance. Yeah, I mean so I think that comes through in Dune.

Our trouble here may just be that there's general psychic hyper awareness. Can you tell the difference between am I reading your mind or am I standing atop the dune viewing the great order of the universe? And one of the things I gain awareness of is what you would be thinking or saying. Yes, Yeah, that's a good point. Another one that comes to mind, This one's hot on uh in my memory since I just watched the whole thing.

But then the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones has the villain Purple Man Zebediah Killgrave and fabulous, fabulous villain that used his mind control what he but what he commands you to do, you want to do. You don't just turn into a zombie. They just just a nice exploration of this to where if he puts an impulse in your mind, like that's the thing you want. So that's

not just communication, that's full online control. Yeah, but it's it kind of leaks into some of the stuff we're gonna talk later, and that he kind of it's kind of I get the impression that kill Grave is kind of temporarily thinking with your brain. And so he's thinking with your brain and giving you, you know, something to to want, something to believe in that you know or or desire that you normally would not. Well, that blurs a line that will become important later in this episode

when we talked about scientific studies. Yea indeed and uh. And another thing about kill Grave is that, you know, it raises the question that if there's an outside force making you want or believe something temporarily, and then that a force eventually you know, it's it's influence is gone, how does that affect what you're going to believe or want in the long term? You know, like, how does that memory and form? Can you remember that you wanted

something but recognize that it was not original to your mind? Yeah? Indeed, so I thought that was a There were some some excellent explorations of that in in that particular show um in the Vampire in the Vampire novel by John Steckley Vampires where the s is a dollar sign, which was adapted into John Carpenter's movie, But believe me the book, So yeah, that the book is really really frightening and

terrifying and the just hideous. Yeah. But the vampires in the book they engage in in mind control that's very similar to to kill Gray and from the world of Dungeons and Dragons, I feel like I need to mention just a couple of species real quick. There's of course the mild communal meditation of the fungal my conid species. Okay, you know, shambling fungus people benevolent that live in the under dark. But yeah, they engage in a kind of

communal meditation. And then also they're the hive mind colligue colonies of the alipid mind flares, and there of course just catastrophically evil uh beings spent and they're using all of just about every shade of of psychic power and telepathic power to to work their evil schemes in the under dark. They strike terror just by directly transmitting the

pages of the monster manual that feature them into your brain. Yeah, and and they also it's like a whole host of under dark creatures in Dungeon and Dragons there are weird and twisted and horrible because the mind players use their abilities to enslave their species in a in an earlier times. So yeah, it seems to me that in all these different conceptions of telepathy from fiction, you can basically break them down into two different categories of communication, linguistic and

non linguistic. So even the linguistic version, of course, is not involving written or spoken words, but it's silent internal brain to brain communication without the senses that still somehow seems to be mediated through language, Like you hear a voice inside your head communicating with you through words, there's some other type of structured, coded message. Then there's non linguistic telepathy, and that's communication that's not mediated by language.

And I think this is more difficult to represent in fiction, but it's the kind we see more often because it's the kind that's even stranger to to to reality. You know, it's one thing to send a message into somebody's brain. You could accomplish almost the same thing by them just having a tiny earpiece, you know, and talking into a microphone. But it's a different thing to download somebody's memories or to uh or to experience uncoded conceptual thought like the

guelf link dream fast I was talking about. And that second kind, I think is it may end up introducing some conceptual problems with the concept of telepathy that we can talk about more once we look at the science. But so today we're gonna be talking primarily about technologically enabled brain to brain communication or technologically enabled to empathy, because we we should at least give a brief nod

to the concept of paranormal telepathy. I don't think we need to spend a lot of time on this because I think by and large our listeners are are scientific skeptics of one kind or another. Yeah. I mean, there have been studies into paranormal telepathy, of course, and we could go through all of all those here today, but I think we pretty much decided that this would this would take time away from the more pressing studies we're

gonna discuss regarding technological telepathy. Yes, so we'll just say very briefly that the scientific community has not been convinced that there's ever been any good evidence of telepathy from properly controlled studies. Lots of people have claimed to find evidence of telepathy, but usually when you look at these studies, they're not double blinded, they're not being carried out with the kind of strict rigor you expect if you want to get a scientific result that that you can feel

confidence in. Yeah. So, so by and large, we have not seen any convincing evidence that paranormal telepathy exists. There doesn't seem to be any known mechanism of action for that, so we will leave that to the side for today. Yeah, because when it comes to brain to brain communication, we have all of these other wonderful systems and equally, i mean, even more mind blowing than than than brain sending little

waves because we're communicating with language. We're communicating with all the various expressions and micro expressions that are that are rippling across this facial communication ray that we all have. Yeah, it's one of those things that's, Uh, it can seem kind of silly to say it now, but really just take a second and try to step back from human experience and feel the weirdness of language. It's language is totally normal to us because we use it all the time.

But just try to pretend you're not a creature that uses language, and look at this from the universe's perspective. What a bizarre thing we're doing. We're taking electrical patterns in our brain and then infecting other people with copies of those patterns by making waves in the air. Yeah,

it's freaky. So, setting aside any kind of naturally occurring you know, brain wave telepathy situation going on, we're talking about using technology, using the technology that we've created and have access to, to serve as a bridge between one mind and the next. Yeah. So you might be thinking like, well, wait a minute, how could you do this? Let us

tell you a story. So for years now, scientists have been developing lots of different technologies for brain to computer interfaces or they're often known as b c I S brain computer interfaces. And in physical terms, it makes sense that you can do this because the brain is an electrochemical machine. Things are happening inside the brain when you're

thinking thoughts, when you're performing behaviors. Whenever your brain is doing something, there's electrical activity going on inside it that is allowing that activity, that external activity, or that conscious thought to happen, and it's at ativities are expressed in ways for this reason, that are detectable by machines that

are sensitive to electromagnetism. You have to get outside of this idea that your your mind is this magical soul or that lives in a little meat house in your skull um and just start thinking about the meat house itself as as being the thing. You're taking a very uh, you know, direct approach to what what what is going on with our mind? Yeah, not to not to downgrade the beauty and mysteriousness of consciousness, which is a wonderfully

powerfully strange thing. But when there's something happening in your brain, there is electricity concurrent with that, and so if you can figure out how to measure that electricity, you can

somehow represent it as data that's usable by technology. So what I've just been talking about is neuroimaging, various forms of neuroimaging to take what's going on in the brain and understand that with a computer, say okay, there's some electrical spiking in this part of the brain, here's here's what's going on with action potentials in in this cortical region, and then stimulate that same region in another individual's brain bingo.

So in a sense, it's kind of like peeking behind one puppet theater, you know, out on the street, like a punch and judy thing, right, seeing what what manner of physical manipulations that puppet mat puppet master is making and then transmitting or relating those exact manipulations to a puppet here within a second puppet theater. So that's a great analogy because it encapsulates both what you're trying to do and the limitations we have when we try to

do this. And we'll talk more about the limitations at the end. But notice that that what you just said would only really make sense if both puppet theaters were exactly the same size and had exactly the same puppets and the same type of puppets, and then the exact same method of manipulation, which is not necessarily the case for the brain, but maybe you can get some kind of a approximation. You know, your brain isn't the exact

same as somebody else's brain. Your puppet theater is different, but there are some general rules that operate in both puppet theaters that you can exploit. So let's look at some of the technologies here. What what actual technology would you use if you want to scan somebody else's brain and see what's happening inside there. Well, one of the most powerful methods we would have would be implanted electrodes.

You can implant directly into somebody's brain, cortical microelectrode arrays which are capable of of recording what's going on in the brain, and also what's known as intracortical micro stimulation or i c MS, and this means you can get both input and output with the brain, so you can read the electrical activity to find out what's going on, and if you want to stimulate parts of the brain, you can provide little bits of electric current through these

two light up that part of the brain. You can also use electro cortico bography, which is electrodes on the exposed surface of the brain. If you want to be really weird at out google pictures of this. But if you don't want to cut your skull open, and I think most of us would prefer that method, there are there are still other ways you can scan what's going on in the brain. I think typically they're not going to be as sensitive, so there's a drawback. The advantages

you don't have to go through brain surgery. The advantage or the disadvantages you're not going to get quite as much precision with the signals you're receiving. But you can use f m R I, so that's functional magnetic resonance imaging, So it's like an m r I, except you detect real time activity in the brain by mapping blood flow to different parts of the brain. There's magneto encephalography, which is great. Google pictures of this also. I love telling

people to Google pictures of things. I think I do that pretty often, but this one, this one is worth it because it's a it's a system that detects magnetic field fluctuations caused by electrical activity in the brain. And it looks like you're wearing a hat the size of a car. You're kind of like you get in like the space jockey scene from Alien and then you put on a hat that's as big as a van with tons of wires and stuff. Yeah, it's gigantic and it

just goes over your head. And I guess it's got to be very sensitive to to detect what's going on with these tiny little electrical currents in your brain, but it does it. Yeah, And all of these are methods that I'm sure that you've heard mentioned on this podcast before or in other science podcasts and science literature. These are standard means of looking at the brain and figuring out what's going on. Yeah, and then this very last one is gonna be crucial in some of the studies

we're talking about. It's electro and cephalography or e e g. You've probably heard of this one before, but this one is very appealing because you don't have to get into a chair with a hat the size of the car. You just put some electrodes on your scalp, and the

electrodes they go on the skin on your head. They're really really sensitive to electricity enough that they can read some of the electrical activity in your brain through your scalp, though obviously, like we said, it's not nearly as sensitive as implanted electrodes um And then, of course, if you want to go so that's all the ways we can read what's happening inside your brain. Imagine we want to switch to input on the brain. How can we put

things directly into your brain without the use of your senses. Well, of course, like we said, you can implant electrodes, So just put some get some brain surgery, put those stimulators in your brain and give you little shocks. When we want you to experience something, you can use focused ultrasound, and that's high frequency sound waves targeted at specific parts of the brain. That's experimental. It's been used in animals, but I think it's it's not super cool to use

this in humans yet. And I should throw into like most people are familiar with with ultrasound, probably from you know, hearing about it, you know, us sort of witnessing participating in its use to look inside an individual and see what's going on in their inside, particularly to look at

a at at a grilling fetus. Right, and that just the lines that that ultrasience sound, depending on the frequency, can be used for something as as painless and mundane is that, or it can be used at higher frequencies, much higher frequencies to actually destroy tissue in the body, like being cancer. So this is a more middle ground where we can use it to stimulate but not harm. Little middle ground that's comfortable middle ground when you're talking

about your brain. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna stimulate the tissue, We're not just gonna look at it, but we're also not going through just not enough to melt it, we promise. And then of course the last one we're going to mention is another one that's going to be important in the studies we talk about, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation

or TMS. And this is where you put a nice friendly electro magnet against your skull, carefully aligned over the scalp to target a particular part of the brain, and it pulses with electromagnetism to stimulate electrical activity in the targeted region in your brain. And this is of course the domain of the god helmet. And uh, you know, countless studies out there. Anytime we're looking at at you know, at what's physically going on in the brain versus what

the experience of reality is, you often see this technology employed. Yeah, and so for more than a decade now we've seen experiments using methods like this to send messages to and from to and from brains between brains and computers. These are brain computer interfaces or b C guys. So you can get people to say, control a robot arm with their minds or control a computer cursor with their minds.

This is now pretty much conquered ground and science. We're still getting better at doing it and better at doing it with less invasive procedures, but it's a thing we can comfortably do in science and technology. Monkey moves a robot with its brain. Yeah, but what if instead of communicating with a robot arm or with a computer, you just substituted another brain m And that's where it gets

kind of difficult to comprehend. Yeah, so stuff is going from inside your brain through a computer to another brain and then back the other way. That sounds like you have suddenly discovered a technological basis for telepathy, sharing the contents of our brains, or at least some form of brain activity, without talking, without text, without any external communication of any kind. It's brain to brain communication. All right, Well,

let's let's launch into the studies. We'll get more into discussion of what this would be like, what the experience of melving your mind via technology would consist of. First Let's yeah, let's just launch into some of the studies, most of them pretty recent studies dealing with technological teleopathy. How about some rat to rat brain communication. That's what I'm talking about, rat telepathy. It's my favorite. How many

are there any good novels about rat telepathy? They've got to be is that in secretive nim You know, there there are some rats in dungeons and dragons where and I love these guys because they're called off hand. But each individual rat has a rat intelligence, right, but they have a certain amount of psychic ability. So you get two rats together close together, and their minds melt and they have the intellect of like a double deck or

rat brain. But you know, rats, eventually they form large groups. Two's company three is Willard, right, So you end up with a huge swarm of rats. But they their brain powers all pooled together into a powerful intellect that's capable of launching uh, you know, psychic attacks attack patterns. Yeah. Well, and also just like the mental energy, like they have

so much mental power, they actually have paranormal abilities. Well maybe the people who created those for the Dungeons and Dragons manual went ahead and the time machine to read about this study that was published in Nature called a brain to brain interface for real time sharing of sensory

motor information. So I'm not going to get too much into the details in the study because it was very long and there were multiple experiments described in the study with lots of different aspects to them that we're all individually interesting but kind of technical. So I'll give you the broad overview. There's several different experiments and the basic idea is that you've got two rats, an encoder rat and a decoder rat. So you take both your rats

and you train them on a task. For example, an LED light comes on over one of two levers, either a left lever or right lever, and then you pick that lever. You pick the correct lever, and you get a reward. Now, once the rats have been trained on the basic task enough to be good at it, you split them up into encoders and decoders. These rats get electrodes implanted in their brains with wires running out of their heads. So this probably is not an experiment you

want to try on your friends at home. But the encode rat has a micro electrode array that can read its neuronal activity, so essentially it's measuring the electrical pattern between cells in the brain like we're talking about earlier. And the decode rat also has electrodes implanted its brain for intracortical micro stimulation or i c MS like we mentioned earlier. So the encoder rat gets the same familiar stimulus.

For example, the the l e ed over the left lever lights up, and then it goes to press the correct lever to get its reward. It presses the left lever, But then the decoder rat gets its turn and it doesn't get a clear visual signal. Instead of the LED just popping up over the left lever, the l E ED lights come on over both levers instead. What happens is that the micro electrode array measures the first rats

brain activity. Then it runs that data through some analysis and amplification and sends the output straight down the wire into the I I C M S equipment in the decoder rats brain. Then the decoder rats brain lights up in patterns correl A did with the behavior of the encoder rats, so that the decoder rat goes to choose a lever and the translation was on perfect. It didn't get it right every time, but it did a good

bit better than chance. So, through implanning electrodes in the brain, one rat teaches another rat which button to push from a separate room. This is rat to rat education with no external communication required. It's rat brain to rat brain teaching you how to get a reward, all right, and you only have to throw out the stimulus once. You only have to flip the switch once. It's like it's like each rat is a string of Christmas lights and you've just connected them together. Yeah, and so note that

this study was complex. It involved a bunch of other interesting stuff as well, like uh, commentary on the rats as a cooperative die AD computing team, and then uh stuff about feedback from one rat to the other, like the encoder rat also getting positive feedback a reward for when the decoder rat did things right. But any so, this is the creation of a rat to rat brain to brain interface, which they called a bt b I.

And this is a pretty cool study. One of the things I found very interesting is they said, quote, it remains to be explained how the brain simultaneously integrates information generated by direct I c MS and by natural stimuli, for example, real whisker stimulation. And that's referring to a second test they did where the rats were supposed to judge real versus virtual width of an opening by by

touch on the whiskers. Okay, because they're essentially incorporating both natural stimuli and this new you know, unnatural stimuli you will into into their single experience. Right, So, how does the rat, like, what's imagine you are the rat, and how does the rat differentiate between between stimulation coming in through the brain. That's just like the brain being electrically stimulated and the real sensory information it's getting from its

eyes and its whiskers. Can it tell the difference? How how does that information get put together? We don't really know because we have not done such experiments on humans for obvious reasons, So we don't know what the experience is like for the rat. But it's at least powerful enough that the rat can perform tasks based on this incoming brain information. But you know, rat to rat is one thing. Yeah, I think we need to do some

cross species telepathy. Yeah, we want to get a little Willard e here and talk about human to rat mind control. And this study saddled non invasive brain to brain interface establishing functional links between two brains is from April and UH. In this particular study, a US South Koreanan team investigated, UH, that classic question how might a human wag a rat's tail using only their brain and brain to brain interface system that shockingly requires no surgical implantation. So in this

particular experience of SID went down. First, the human controller is hooked up to to that e G based brain computer interface. Again, we're talking electro in cephalography. UM, it's in this some monitoring system generally it's based on scout based electrodes to record electrical activity of the brain. Then they hooked the rat up to a focused ultrasound based computer to brain interface and uh, these again have high frequency sound waves. Uh that are that are going into

the tissue. Uh, not enough to do any damage. Next, they hit the human with some visual stimulation to invoke a little uh steady state visually evoked potential, so we're talking strobe light flashes here. The researchers were then able

to identify the same burst frequency in the humans brain. Okay, Then the humans b c I detects this and then transfers that that same pattern to the focused ultrasound based c b I on the rat, targeting the region of the rat's brain that controls its tail, and this causes the tail to move with the same frequency, this flashing through the humans mind the same frequency this flashing on the strobe lights. Creepy. Yeah. And they used rat. Yeah. They use six different humans and six different rats in

this experiment with success rate. So, I mean, there's a lot of these experiences. They may not seem all that amazing when you break it down into these simple parts but you really have to look at what's being done, and most importantly, what's being done completely non evasively. If it seems simple, that's because the experiment breaks down thought and action into simple components, which is always kind of

both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. When you when you see something that we think of as magical, like thought, broken down into the physical actions that constitute it, it just kind of seems like, really, that's all there is, all right, So what's next on the plate? Then we've gone we've gone rat to rat, we've gone human to rat. What's next? Oh, we gotta go human to human? Okay, okay?

So here was another study came out in ten called conscious Brain to brain Communication and Humans using Noninvasive Technologies published in Plos one. And here are the basics. You've

got a cinder in India and recipients in France. So here we're we're the cinder wears an e G cap like we're saying stuff on the scalp to text electrical activity in the brain, and the recipients sit under a different thing than we've seen before, one of those transcranial magnetic stimulation coils or tms coils and uh and like I said earlier, what this does is it generates an electromagnetic field, so it stimulates the brain with electrical activity

at the sender's end. There are some code words, so the sender with the e G cap gets code words chow and oh lah, a couple of different kind of European hellos, and had to translate them into binary code, so that's ones and zeros are on and off switches. And then the sender had to think about different actions to represent each one and zero in the string to

spell the word. So for example, thinking about moving your hands could be a one and thinking about moving your feet could be a zero, and then they thought out the binary string. So if to spell o lah, it would be like, you know, zero one zero, you have to think about feet and then think about moving your hands, and then think about moving your feet, but on and on as you would have to do to spell the

whole word. So the e G measured those different electrical patterns, sent them to the computer, and then that was sent five thousand miles over the internet to the recipients t MS coils. The t M S coils caused the recipients to experience this is great fast fiends or visions of lights. So you're sitting under this coil, you're sitting in the chair, and suddenly you might see dots or lines sort of

visual light hallucination patterns pop up in your vision. And it's caused by when the pulses of electromagnetism come through the t M S coil, and so different kinds of visions translated into ones and zeros of code. And once you've got your string of ones and zeros from the TMS code, you could translate that back into text from the binary code. And thus brain to brain communication of coded messages in language was achieved over five thousand miles.

You see some of the media reports, it sounds like they're kind of gushing over the fact that it was five thousand miles, Like the distance matters a lot when it just comes down to the use of the internet, you know, yeah, exactly. To me, maybe there's something I didn't understand, but to me that the distance didn't really seem to matter. I mean, once you've got a decoded brain signal on the Internet, sent to somebody else and then recoded back into the message it was supposed to be,

it's the Internet. Why does it matter if it's one mile or a hundred miles or a thousand miles. Yeah, exactly. But anyway that that that's some human to human text communication. But then there's another one, and this one got some interesting media attention. I actually wrote about this last year for a forward thinking video, but it was also published in Plos one and it was called a direct brain to brain interface and humans. And this involves a video game.

So it's it's cooperative gaming. No, it didn't sound like a very good video. I'm looking at the image right now. It's one of these video games. Yeah, it sounded like I think it was one of those free video games. No, it may have been designed purposefully for this study. I

don't know. It looks it looks kind of boring. Yes, So researchers at the University of Washington published this study showing they were they were able to establish a non invasive brain to brain an interface between people which allowed them to cause movements in a different person's body without speech across the internet to play the game. So it works this way. One person sits in a room with

the ability to look at a screen. The screen has the game on it and what you see on the game is that there's a pirate ship launching rockets at a city, and you've got control of a cannon that can shoot down the rockets if you time the cannon shot right. So you gotta wait until the pirate ship shoots a rocket, and then when it does, you shoot your cannon to shoot the rocket and knock it out of the sky. Pretty simple, right, But the problem is

you can't press a button. The only person who has a controller to control the game is in a different room across the campus, different buildings, like exactly right. So you are sitting there watching the screen of the game with an e G cap on your head, and when you see that it's time to press that button to shoot down the rocket, you think, move my hand. You don't move your hand, You just think move my hand. The e G cap records that and says, oh, okay,

it's time. Since that information across the internet to the room which has the other person sitting in it. Now, this person cannot see the screen that the game is being played on, but this person is the ability to press the button to fire the rocket, and when the when the timing is right, when the signal arrives, it activates a t MS coil that causes their hand to jerk. And when that causes their hand to jerk, they press a button that says fire the rocket. That signal goes

back to the game and fires the rocket. So you have to so neither one can play the game alone. They have to coh operate to play the game, and they can't talk about it. It's just thought to thought to action, all right. I think that makes that makes sense. I think everybody's falling along with that. So so what was the success rate? Like? How did how did these

weirdly conjoined individuals um perform in this simple game? So there were three pairs of subjects and they correctly identified and destroyed eighty three point three percent percent and thirty seven point five percent of the rockets, respectively during the the experimental games, and then they had a zero percent success rate during control games. Uh so they did better in the experimental games where real information was being transmitted than in the control games when it wasn't. So there

are several takeaways from this. One of the things that I think is interesting about this is that the receiver's action is not conscious. They're not thinking they're not getting a message that they're decoding. They're just being caused to jerk, all right, So they're not hearing a voice in their head that's saying saying, shoot it, now, push the button, now, push the button now. It's just happening. No, they're they're getting some magnetism that says, uh, Suddenly their hand moves

and they press a button. Uh. There are three takeaways that the authors of the study came up with. So they said, one of the takeaways from the study is that we've got the technology now that's sufficient to develop devices for rudimentary brain to brain communication. So that's one of the things they say. They've demonstrated it's already here.

We can do it now, though it is rudimentary. The second thing they point out is that working brain to brain interfaces can be built out of non invasive technologies. Neither person here required a brain implant. Uh. They it

was e g. To the transcranial magnetic stimulation. And then the third thing they point out is that this is very rudimentary, but the fact that it can be done at all means we need to start having a conversation between ethicis neuroscientists and regulatory agencies on the ethical, moral, and societal implications of b b I. S Uh, they're they're talking. They're about the ones that could grow in the future out of the rudimentary technologies that are being

developed now. Yeah, yeah, setting the stage for the whole world of neural security, right, neuro security protecting our our our thoughts and emotions and true feelings from all those technologically enhanced scanners out there. Yeah. Now, there's an even

more recent study on this, right. There was one that came out just in September of this year in September, where it was not exactly the same group but most of the same scientists, uh, some of the same authors from that that previous one published again in p OS one a study called Playing twenty Questions with the Mind collaborative problem solving by humans using a brain to brain interface, and it was a set up a lot like the

last one. It was pretty much just the same with cinder with e G and a receiver using a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil. But instead what they did here, instead of playing a video game together, they got them to trade coded messages in order to play a game of twenty questions without talking. Okay, so this is communication that goes beyond merely just push that button, push that button right, and but it's still one of the things worth pointing

out is that it is still coded communication. Now that they had a pretty high success rate, the setup is a is a whole lot like the last experiment you've got to You've got a sender wearing an e G cap to read their brain, and you've got a receiver under a t MS coil to uh to give them information.

Except what's different here is that instead of the t MS coil giving somebody a jerk hand movement in the hand, it gives them what we were talking about earlier, a phosphene a vision, and they can use that to decode information sent by the person in the e G cap and by trading information back and forth this way, by being able to answer yes or no questions by sending them a phosphene or not, these people can ask an answer questions, to play a game of twenty questions to

guess an object without any words or language. So the basic ideas, say you have a parakeet in mind, the person asks a question that they select from a square

from a screen like can this thing fly? And then the person in the e G cap gives a stimulus by looking at two different lights to answer yes or no, and then that goes back to the person who answered the question and they get they get a sense of whether the answer is yes or no by whether or not they get this vision of light from the from the coil, and by going back and forth this way they can solve the puzzle and eventually figure out what

the object is. And this set up allowed the people in the experimental group to win seventy two percent of the games. And so there's a control group where no genuine information was being traded back and forth, and only eight percent of those participants were able to correctly identify the object. So pretty cool this twenty questions without words. Well, actually know, there were words because you had to select the questions to go back and forth, but the answers

didn't require words. It was just coded brain signals, the flashes of light in the mind. Yeah, okay, So the authors themselves point out a couple of limitations at the end.

One of them is that the kind of obvious thing is that this doesn't necessarily provide any better communication than talking, right, it's it feels very hamstrong that you're having to to to rely on this convoluted method of flashes, where when really we have far better means of communication at artists, it would be much easier to play the game by

by text messages or just by talking. But they point out how well, even something like this could probably help in somebody who has uh, for example, the inability to move or speak if it broke as aphasia or something like that, um or if it's being played between people who don't speak the same language. So so that that's a possibly a good point. But then they also point out that this is just sort of a proof of concept for technologies that could become much more power and

powerful and sensitive in the future, and that's the real question. Yeah. And then the other thing they point out is a limitation of their own study, is that it doesn't allow bi directional transfer of information. The information is going from one person to the other, but it would be very interesting to hook up both the sender and the recipient,

or both people at least with both capabilities. So you've got an e G and a t MS coil and you can send information back and forth both ways, which is when things would really start getting creepy, all right. So there's a taste of where we are with the with the with the research and the technology, where and and and an idea of where we may be going. So how do we prepare for and what's it going to be like as these more advanced telepathic technologies become

available and even become a part of our life. Well. I think it's interesting because it's a question whether these have really changed that concern we brought up at the beginning of the episode about linguistic versus non linguistic telepathy. Um, if it's just saying that you will be able to send coded messages like like this kind of binary morse code type thing we were talking about earlier between brains,

that's one thing. If it were to somehow become the case that you could send something more complex and difficult to quantify, like a non encoded thought or memory or something like that, that would be very interesting. But I don't know if that's even possible, because, like we talked about with our puppet theater analogy, your puppet theater is

not exactly the same as somebody else's puppet theater. They can't just put electrodes in your brain and say, well, I'm going to share this, uh, this image by lighting up exactly the same neurons in your brain that are lit up in somebody else's brain. You don't have the same neurons as them. Everybody's brain is going to be a little bit different. So I'm not sure how that would even work without some kind of encoding back and forth.

And this is something that's been pointed out in some of the criticism of these studies and the supposed implications of it. Again, they are just sending coded messages, right, It's still basically language. It's not emotions ideas thoughts though the one about making the hand jerk or making the tail wag is kind of interesting because that's motor control. But for the most part of these situations where you could still lie, it's not like it's so this direct,

you know, unfiltered communication system. Yeah, but what would that be like that? That's the thing I keep coming back to, what would what would it be like to have this communal mind experience with someone else? And in researching this, I came across a really cool u A in magazine

article by Peter Watt's titled hive consciousness and UH. In this he points out that the brain that makes us who we are, you know, essentially it quotes, spreads across two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus colossum, a fat, meaty pipe more than two hundred million accents thick. Yeah. This sort of the idea that you've already got two

brands in a way. Yeah. And in fact, he points out that if you were to cleave these hemispheres in two and that's indeed a last ditch surgery that sometimes a uh see employee that deal with to deal with certain forms of epilepsy, each half would go its own way, developing its own taste and beliefs. And to support this, he points to uh a talk that was given by noted to neuroscientist Vilanio Ramachandren at the two thousand six Beyond Belief Conference, And you can find video of this

on YouTube. I'll try and link to the clip on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Build Your Mind dot Com. But Ramachandren points h he shares an account of a split brain patient with a Christian hemisphere and an atheist one. Uh, and they have to end up having to teach the hemispheres to commune kate with each other. So the the general idea here, I think was that he's saying that the corpus colossum helps,

uh homogenize the two different brains. It creates the conscious illusion that your hemispheres are in accord with one another. But if you're able to sever them and you don't have this high bandwidth connection between them, they're very much two different minds. Yeah, and it's not a gradual separation either. It's not like a musical duo breaking up and then each struggles for years to find their own solo identity. You know, this side of the brain eventually becomes atheist

and this side eventually becomes a believer. No, scientists can actually induce hemispheric isolation chemically in the brain, just shutting it down U uh and uh and then watching, just without any delay, the undrugged hemisphere sort of coming into its own, becoming the primary decider, developing a whole new personality right there in front of us. So like I I anesthetize your left brain and I suddenly see your brain evil twin emerges the dominant personality, which was really

only half of you before. Yeah, it reminds me of a character in the Culture book by Enim Banks consider Flibus. There's a character name uh Craikland who has enhanced hemispheric task division in his brain, but basically he sleeps with one eye open. He can use a uni hemispheric sleep much like a you know, like many animals out there that never completely put their brain under. So one third of the time, one half of his brain sleeps and

he's a bit dreamy and vague. Another third of the time he's all logic in numbers and doesn't communicate all that well. And only one third of the time is he fully awake with both sides of his brain making up who he is. That's pretty cool, yeah, and uh yeah, So it's it's interesting to think of it in terms of rama Chandren's example. He he jokingly pointed out, what happens to this individual dies? Does half his brain go

to heaven and one half go to hell? And uh And it makes us ask some difficult questions about conscious this itself, because consciousness remains something of the mystery and when we have a hell of a time unraveling and as author our Scott Backer points that we're trying to explain the magic of a coin trick, right, But we're in a horrible position because we are the magic that we're trying to understand. We're trying to explain se consciousness.

You mean, yeah, with consciousness and then but ultimately with any any time time we try and tackle our you know, our our cognition and our and our brain activity, and certainly we try to translate it into another being or try to bring two of them together. We have to we have to unravel the magic of the human experience. Yeah, well, we mentioned this earlier. I mean, when you start under understanding consciousness for some reason, it's kind of a scary thing.

Like we we like this magical illusion of the unified self to to persist. And when you start separating consciousness into constituent parts or understanding I mean we I'm not saying we fully understand justousness, but even understanding little bits that might inform how it comes together, it's a little alarming. You don't like the idea that your consciousness can be explained via, you know, a combination of different processes in

the brain. But one of the scary things here is is the implication going back to brain to brain interfaces. That what if combining different brains with technology in different skulls will become just as seamless as combining the two hemispheres of your brain via the corpus colossum. Uh. And it's such that maybe our producer Null and our other co host Christian would link their brains up via computer and it wouldn't feel like they were two different brains connected.

It would just feel like they were one brain. Yeah. Like essentially would be like you know, like a Vultron scenario or um or or like an assemblage of of keywords. So like, oh, we we need somebody who's really good at maritime law, but we also need somebody who really is really tuned into pop culture, and we need to go out and speak Well, what can we do? Well, let's just take these two individuals, hook them up together and make them manifest a new individual who is a

perfect uh you know, convergence of those two uh skill sets. Now, now again, I want to say, who knows if such a thing as possible? We don't want to get to uh to hype heavy here and suggest that we we've now demonstrated that it's possible to link brains up in a way that they seamlessly combined. But just the mere possibility of that is a very like human experience changing proposition. Yeah,

and when what are the legal ramifications? So if if me, if you and I, if we conjoined our brains with some fancy helmets and essentially became this different mind state, and then that mind state broke a law or invented something, you know, who owns that invention, who's responsible for that crime?

And then it gets even weird. Or if you look at our own brains and think of it as to havels of brains that are connected together, it's like which individual has the right to exist and even his personhood the the Joe Robert being Joe Robert or the two halves of Joe in your head and the two halves of Robert in mind? Right, I mean, do you think it's possible for one hemisphere of your brain to conspire to kill the other one? Yeah, or sue it, or or get out of some sort of a neural divorce.

We'll be all right, brain from now on. Uh Yeah. Well, anyway, if we've got you worried about this, based on this final discussion, it is a good thing to consider in the long run. But please do remember that these these experiments we've been talking about in this episode don't indicate anything like that yet. Like we we certainly don't want to get into the over hype machine that the types of communication, not the over hyph machine, but maybe the

over dream machine. Like take these and run wild with the possibilities. But don't you know, this is still super super rudimentary communication. Like we said, it's it's very coded, it requires extremely bulky and difficult and expensive equipment, and it's it's it's impressive in one sense that it can be done at all, but what can be done with it is not that impressive yet. Indeed, who knows how impressive it will be or is impressive the right word?

Who knows how daunting and and mind bending it will be? Yeah? Game changing? Alright, Well, there you have it, a little explanation into technological telepathy and some of the possible near future and far future ramifications. Oh, looks like we have an update coming in. We don't have a lot of these roll into the podcast, but here's the one right now.

All right, this is this has to do with our recent episode December sevent i believe grand theft genome gene steelers in the wild and which Joe and I explored several examples of horizontal gene transfer. Yeah, that's the process where genes from one organism travel into another organism that is not its direct offspring, but some other contemporary creature living at the same time. Yeah. And uh, one of the creatures we discussed is the tarte grade, the water bear,

the moss picklet pernial favorite here. Yeah, yeah, very cool animal. Uh. And we were drawing on a November twenty third, two fifteen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Uh, this is the one where they claimed that the Tartar grade possessed nearly one sixth or seventeen point five percent foreign DNA. That amounts to about six thousand, six hundred genes of

pilfer genetic goodness. This is a remarkable claim that up to one sixth of of this organism's d NA came from foreign sources, so not from its parents or its parents parents, but other organisms that lived around it. And as we discussed in the episode, this hi it's a

sort of using facts. So we pounced on it and it and it ties into this idea of the tartar grade is this ultrahardy organism that may have stolen some of its acquired some of its its hardiness from hardy bacteria or actually, to be clear on what I just said, that the idea was that it so it did get it from its parents and parents parents, but they got it from other organisms. It wasn't just a direct lineal passing along of genes in the same branch of the

evolutionary tree. Yeah, so we weren't the only ones who were maained, but we weren't the only ones to to pounce on it because in the weeks that followed, a second team from the University of Edinburgh, who were also sequencing the tartar grade genome chimed In, reported that they've found very few horizontally transferred genes and the tartar grate between thirty six and five hundred and their charge is that thirty of the unc genome probably came from contaminating microbes.

In other words, they think that the results were contaminated with random bacteria from the lab. Yeah, and this is a problem that course can happen when you're dealing with microbiology. Typically scientists do a lot to try to rule out these types of errors. And uh, and I think we can assume that the the U n C team was doing their best, like that they were doing good work, but at least this cross comparison of results shows that whatever measures they put in place, at some point they

must have failed. Yeah, and you know, this is what we're observing here, ultimately is not This is not a soap opera. This is this is science working the way it's supposed to. If somebody makes mistake, if or may have made a mistake, then someone else can chime in and say, hey, our study says something a little differently.

Let's let's see where the truth lies. Yeah, and hopefully by comparing and synthesizing the results of these two studies, we can figure out not just what the truth about the Tartegrade genome is and how much horizontal gene transfer has informed its lineage, but also help hone the types of procedures that these experimenters are using, because is you know, learning from our mistakes is one of the best ways

to get better at doing science. Before we head out here, I just want to remind everyone head on over to Stuff to Blow your mind dot Com if you want to check out all the podcast episodes, all the videos, blog post links out to our social media accounts. It's all there. And in the meantime, how can they get in touch with us? How can they? How can they communicate the contents of their brain to our brains the

magic of the Internet. Well, you can use some good old Stone age linguistic technology and type out an email and send it to us. That blow the mind. At how the Works dot for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com joined four point of part propo