The Hive Mind: Brain-to-Brain Interfacing (BBI)
Life consists of successive hierarchical biological relationships. Over billions of years, evolution has selected for increasing levels of mutualistic associations from conglomerates of cells to the formation of tissues to entire organ systems. You are the song produced by this symphony of cells, a synchronous cacophony of individual entities all harmonizing to create the melody which is you. Your perception of a singular stream of consciousness is thus emergent despite being orchestrated by trillions of smaller parts. With this framework in mind, the next logical advancement in mutualism is strengthening the connection between biological organisms.
Currently, language exists as the currency through which we can learn from the thoughts of others. Arguably the most brilliant evolutionary invention to date, language lets us leverage the cognitive resources of our peers and expand our computational power beyond that of our own cortex.
But while natural language is inexplicably beautiful and incredibly powerful, it is imperfect in many ways. Much is lost in the translation of conceptual information from thought to words, and back from words into thought. This is because language embodies the conceptualization of reality into concrete concepts, which does not always accurately capture reality in its essence. Beyond that, the translation between various languages is flawed, reflecting the manner by which different cultures conceptualize reality.
Direct transmission of thoughts could thus pose as a more efficient and efficacious approach to communication, without the chance for things to become muddled by linguistics. While the idea of “air-dropping” your thoughts to a friend may seem the subject of science fiction, preliminary work in the field of brain-to-brain interfaces (BBIs) suggest science fiction could become science fact sooner than we think.
BBIs are interfaces allowing the extraction and delivery of information between brains without involvement of the peripheral nervous system via neuromonitoring and neurostimulation techniques (Hildt 2019). This technology offers to revolutionize the manner in which we communicate with one another, raising interesting questions about individuality, identity, and the potential implications of emergence of the “hive mind.”
In 2019, Jiang et. al. showcased the first ever multi-person non-invasive direct BBI for collaborative problem solving (Jiang et al. 2019). Using an interface called BrainNet, three participants cooperated via brain-to-brain communication to solve a Tetris-like game. BrainNet combines both electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technology to record and deliver information, respectively. EEG involves the recording of electrical signals from the brain through noninvasive electrodes applied to the scalp. TMS, on the other hand, is a noninvasive form of stimulation using changes in magnetic field to apply an electrical current to a specific brain region.
In Jiang et al.’s proof-of-concept experiment, two participants acted as “Senders” whose brain signals were decoded using real-time EEG. This analysis extricates a Sender’s decision about whether or not to rotate a block in the tetris-like game before dropping it into place. This decision is then transmitted to the third individual, known as the “Receiver,” through the Internet. The decision is then translated into magnetic stimulation delivered to the occipital cortex. The occipital cortex is the region of the brain responsible for vision. The Receiver, who cannot see the screen of the game, integrates the information from both Senders in deciding whether or not to rotate the block using the EEG interface. A second round of communication allows Senders to then evaluate the Receiver’s decision and send additional feedback if necessary.
Researchers evaluated BrainNet’s performance looking at group performance, true/false positive rates of participant decisions, and the amount of mutual information between subjects. They found after looking at 5 separate groups of 3 that BrainNet had an average of 81.25% accuracy.
They additionally looked at how a Receiver interrogates noisy signals in order to reach a correct decision. To do this, one of the Sender’s streams of information was injected with noise to make their signals unreliable. Throughout multiple trials, the Receiver was able to learn which Sender was more reliable and thereby give more selective weight to their decisions on whether or not to rotate the block. This is not far from how you might find some friends more trustworthy than others and take or disregard their advice accordingly.
This next generation of BBIs is novel in that it involves the pooling of information from multiple streams of thought into a single individuals’ decision making, not unlike a social network.
As this technology develops, the potential applications are endless, from serving as assistive devices for paralyzed patients to allowing silent commands in a military context, or for the general public changing the ways we solve problems, communicate, form social networks, game, and more. Eventually, the creation of a large network of individuals connected by BBIs connected to a cloud-based server could be possible.
Philosophically, it is worth pondering the emergence of a higher echelon of intelligence — a hive mind — operating on the integration of individual inputs from thousands of people. After all, if trillions of singular cells can come together to form the complex, multifaceted person you are, who is to say what will happen on an even grander scale? This question reveals many more questions regarding the idea of a “collective consciousness.” Ultimately, what such a shared consciousness might look like is unknown, but we might look to other organisms who operate on a grander scale than the individual, like bees. Each bee within a hive acts with little regard for their own individuality, only doing what contributes to the overarching goal of the hive. The arrival of such a novel form of human cooperation might necessitate changes in the way we think about things like law and governance. Many current laws are grounded in the idea of individual rights and property and therefore may not translate exactly to the existence of shared identities. Additionally, there might be concepts, goals, and ideas understood only at the level of the collective, which could not be grasped at the individual level.
While much of this remains far-fetched speculation, the prospect of BBI technology is certainly abuzz with potential.
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