From the Vault: Techno-Telepathy

are you doing reruns lately? Aren't you doing new episodes? We should be clear. I hope you're getting all of the new episodes we're releasing just as many original episodes as always. That has not changed. Uh. These Saturday Vault selections are in addition to our regular lineup, so you are not missing out on any new stuff to Blow your Mind content. If you're not getting our new regular episodes on Tuesday and Thursday, check your feed or use

a different way of getting to them. Yeah, and by all means note the original publication date because you know, a lot of these topics do involve scientific stories and scientific findings, but in general, if there's something major that has changed, we will either not rerun it, or we'll make sure to clue you into what has occurred, or we'll be oblivious and hear about it from you later exactly, and then we'll just that's just part of the fan conversation.

So it's all good either way. So this episode was originally called Brain to Brain The Science of Techno Telepathy, and it aired on December twenty two, so it's a couple of years old now, but I think this one still holds up. It's still an interesting and developing topic in neuroscience and neuro technology, and I especially would like to revisit this idea sometime in the future with reference to the ideas of neuro security that we discussed in in another episode from a while back. So anyway, I

hope you enjoy the Science of Techno Telepathy. Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from housetop works dot com. I would like to scan all of them in this room, one at a time. I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, ear aches, stomach cramps. Wait, wait, joke, You can't just scan everybody in the room. Well why not? Will did you get everyone to sign those consent forms? I figured they show up for a press conference, they must be

game for a little till episode. But they might have pre existing health conditions. I mean, you just warned them that they might get cramps and nose bleeds, you know, mild nosebleeds. I mean, we're not gonna catch anybody on fire or any 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 doesn't even touch 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 bears. 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 migraine forming here. Okay, I'm good. That was 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,

uh catalog of sequels I 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 Top one and then Scanner Cop two, which is also sometimes essentially Scanners four, depending on which a version of the at least 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 the 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 frequency cascade that makes their head blow up, right, and I think you can make fire, and you can you can well then also there's at least 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 goadline. 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 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 in Miriam 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. Yeah, we're engaging in a in in 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. 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 in values.

But this particular study found there's kind of the the opposite in many cases, because you end up having an idea in your head of what that other individual wants and needs and it may not actually be accurate, but you're no longer feeling it out as much anymore, because it's 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 when we started off with an example from a fictional sci fi horror movie. 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 uh sort of telepathic ability, though it seems to extend beyond

just communication. Telepathy 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 sensory 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 guelf Lin dream Fast in that vaguely? That's uh, that's when Jin and Kira, I believe, the two gelf Liings meet and the sort of they kind of have this mind meld moment where they share visions of their childhood, right, they share their memories. It 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 Vulcan mind meld in Star 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 Hanstin's I've seen any trek with actual mind melding moments. But yeah, alright, well a few that came to my mind. Well, first of all, uh, 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 literature on telepathy is that it's difficult to tell the difference between different types of extra sense reperception 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, 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, uh, fabulous villain

that uses mind control. What he but what he commands you to do you want to do. You don't just turn into a zombie. They use a nice exploration of this to where if he puts an impulse in your mind, like that 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 he's 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 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. Yeah, 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 was some some excellent explorations of that 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 is 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 meld communal meditation of the fungal my conid species. 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 college colonies of the alipid mind flares, and there of course just catastrophically evil uh beings, and they're using all a bit just about every shade of of psychic power and telepathic power to to work their evil schemes. The under Duck they strike terror just by directly transmitting the pages of the Monster Manual to

feature them into your brain. Yeah, and and they also it's like a whole host of under dark creatures in Dungeon. Dragons are 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 or some other type of structured coded message. Then there's non linguistic telepathy, and that's commune mucation 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 telepathy, 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 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 going to 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 and equally, I mean even more mind blowing than than than brains 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. 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. 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 its activities 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 know, taking a very uh 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 the action potentials in in this cortical region, and then stimulate that

same region in another individual's brain being. 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 that 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 to the exact same method of manipulation, which is not necessarily the case for the brain, but maybe you can get some kind of 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 all 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 m S, 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 corticography, which is electrodes on the exposed surface of the brain. If you want to

be really weird at out, google pictures of this. Uh. But if you don't want to cut your skull open, and I think most of us would prefer that method. There 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 gonna 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 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 you're kind of like you get in like the space jockey scene from Alien and then you put it on a hat that's as big as a van with tons of the 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, in 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. And 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 there inside, particularly to look at a at at a grilling fetus, right, And that just underlines that that ultrasoience sound, depending on the frequency, can be used for something as as pain us and mundane is that, or it can be used

at higher frequencies, much higher frequencies to actually destroy tissue in the body, like in 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 to 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, what's physically going on into 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. Mm hmm. That's where it gets kind of difficult to comprehend. Uh. 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 molving 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 telepathy. 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 who 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 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 we 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 a 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. In the 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 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 patterns between cells in the AND like we're talking

about earlier. And the decode rat also has electrodes and implanted in 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 LED 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 correlated with the behavior of the encoder rats, so that the decoder rat goes to choose a lever and the translation was on a 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 di 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 anyway, so this is 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 tattled non invasive brain to brain interface establishing functional links between two brains is from April and Uh. In this particular study, a US South Korean team investigated, uh, that classic question how might a human wag a rat's tale using only their brain and brain to brain interface system that shockingly requires no surgical implantation. So in this particular experience of how it 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 the 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 cb 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 that's flashing through the humans mind, the same frequency this flashing on the

strobe lights. Creepy, yeah, and the rat. Yeah. These 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 o 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 a law, 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 TMS coils caused the recipients to experience this is great phosphenes or vision 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 got your string of ones and zeros from the t MS 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 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 reek aded back into the message it was supposed to be, it's the Internet, And 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 interface between pete 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've got to 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 has 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 cooperate 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 that? How did these uh 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, twenty five 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. 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 atist 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 o 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 the 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 cinder 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 of 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 and 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 all to correctly identify the object. So pretty cool. This is 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'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 and 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 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 type, with the with the research and the technology where and in an idea of where we may be going. So how do we prepare for and what's it gonna 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 in this he points out that the brain that makes us who we are, you know, essentially, it quotes, spreads across two cerebritl 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 brains in a way, 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 to 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 neuroscientist Villano Ramaschandren 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 Boil Your Mind

dot com. But Ramachandren points the 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 communicate with each other. So the the general idea here, I think was that he's saying that the corpus colosum 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 atheists, and this side

eventually becomes a believer. No, scientists can actually induce hemispheric isolation chemically in the brain, just shutting it down uh and uh and then watching just without any delay that the undrugged hemisphere sort of coming into its own, becoming the primary decider, developing a whole new personality right there in front of so, Like I I a neesthetize your left brain and I suddenly see your right 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 Craiklin 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 uh. 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 Ramachandren's example. He he jokingly pointed out, what happens if 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 consciousness itself, because consciousness remains something of a 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 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, that'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 in to constituent parts or understanding I mean we I'm not saying we fully understand consciousness, 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 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 it's 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. Yeah. 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 and 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 in 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 weirder if you look at our own brains and think of it as two halves

of brains that are connected together. It's like which individual has the right to exist and even his personhood that the Joe Robert being Joe Robert or the two halves of Joe in your head and the two halves of Robert in mind. 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 will

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 overhype machine that the types of communication, not the overhype machine, but maybe the over dream machine.

You 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 uh and mind bending it will be? Yeah? Game changing? Alright. Well, there you have it, a little exploration into technological telepathy and some of the possible near future and far future ramifications. Before we head out here, I just want to remind everyone, Hey, don't over to stuff to Blow your mind dot com. If you want to check out all the podcast episodes, all the videos, blog postlinks out to our social media accounts, it's all there. And in the meantime, how can they

get in touch with us? How can 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 House of Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot Com. Remember