“Second brain” is the new third eye
In 2019, a team from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon led by Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco published the first paper ever showing successful brain-to-brain communication in multiple humans (nicely summarized in this two-minute video). Their system, called BrainNet, is able to extract information from one person’s brain and deliver it to another. Using completely non-invasive methods, teams of participants managed to cooperate in a game of Tetris using thoughts as their only means of communication. While the interface is still quite rudimental, this proof of concept opens up endless new possibilities.
Hybrid brains
The term BrainNet was actually coined by Miguel Nicolelis, Brazilian neuroscientist and professor at Duke University. His lab is best known for pioneering brain-to-brain communication as well as brain-machine interfaces. In 2002, his team had a monkey called Aurora control a robot’s arm that was separate from her own body. The robot reacted to Aurora’s thoughts, and faster than her real arms did. In 2013, a monkey from Duke controlled an entire robot’s walk in Japan; all it had to do was imagine the movements. In the same year, Nicolelis made one rat use the senses of another rat to make decisions in its own environment through real-time sharing of information. If that’s not surprising enough, consider that one rat was in the United States, the other one in Brazil. According to Nicolelis, this is not mere telepathy, but the creation of “a new central nervous system made of two brains”. He viewed brain-to-brain communication as the creation of a semi-biological computer. Back in 2014, he stated that his job was to find out whether it was possible to build such a hybrid: whether we should do it would be a question for the future. Just a few years later, that future doesn’t look too far away. So, it is important to start thinking about the potential of these technologies, the harm that they could do if used inappropriately, and how to prevent their abuse.
I just thought to say I love you
Many of us have been prevented from seeing their loved ones during the lockdown weeks. If Zoom calls and texts are the letters of today, could telepathy be the WhatsApp of tomorrow? Imagine being able to actually send people thoughts and your best wishes. Even more than that, you could make them feel your love by sharing some sense of warmth and cosiness. But the brain is not a passive decoder of external signals. Instead, it constantly predicts and constructs the world as we perceive it, so that given the same stimuli, different brains will see, sense, hear, taste, smell slightly different things. Could brain-to-brain communication allow us to find out whether the colour blue looks the same to everyone? Similar applications have been explored in a Black Mirror episode titled Black Museum, where a doctor gets an implant that allows him to feel his patients’ experiences. While the show takes a rather dark turn (as you could expect from its title), imagine how this possibility could revolutionize our understanding of chronic pain, dementia, depression, anxiety, if doctors and researchers could more directly assess the symptoms through a BrainNet.
1+1 isn’t 2
George Bernard Shaw once said “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” By joining two or more brains, we could go beyond simple communication and start finding answers to the problems that single brains cannot solve. This idea has actually been around for decades before Nicolelis’s experiments, and bears the epithet of “swarm intelligence”.
Swarm intelligence emerges as similar individuals self-organize as a group and make choices to find a solution that unifies them under the same decision. Think of a school of fish assembling without a central leader, or a colony of wasps (each with its own role) building a nest in a highly coordinated fashion. But swarm intelligence is not limited to animals: plants too show a form of intelligence, albeit a decentralized one, and their root apices (easily comparable to neuronal networks) are capable of complex problem solving. According to Stefano Mancuso, plant neurobiologist luminaire, plant root apices resemble brains in their ability to generate and receive electrical and chemical signals. While conserving their identity, single plant roots communicate with others to solve collective problems such as “should we grow?”, “in which direction?”, “is that mushroom going to be a good symbiotic partner?”, just to name a few. With advanced brain-to-brain interaction, decentralized intelligence could be the new human reality, with single individuals acting as the processing nodes of a giant neural (social) network. The internet would make “no man is an island’’ become an objective truth instead of an auspicious reminder.
But are the many always smarter than the single individual? Does the wisdom of the crowd always offer a better solution? The computational advantage depends on the specific question you’re asking. Apparently, averaging the responses of a crowd can give you a good estimate of the number of marbles in a large glass jar, but of the number of coin flips required to make an all-heads probability as small as that of winning the German lotto, where expert knowledge is much more useful. Think of it as a round of “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, where you can ask for help by either getting the audience’s vote or calling a friend on the phone who is also an historian. Your choice will likely depend on the question — whether it’s about the cost of a gallon of milk or the year the USSR was dissolved.
A greedy organ
Why limit ourselves to other humans? Other animals show exceptional talents at some tasks that might interest you. The same way that you would hope to download Yo-Yo Ma’s skills if playing cello is what you fancy, you might want to look into bats if you need to echolocate. Want to find truffles? Brain-to-brain interface your dog. In this brilliant TED talk, David Eagleman illustrated how brains are simply data-hungry general purpose biological machines. The input source doesn’t matter, as long as it keeps providing useful information. According to his potato head model, eyes, limbs, mouths and noses are just tools that the brain uses to interpret the world and happen to have been stuck into our body throughout the course of evolution. They are no more special than other sensing devices, such as the ones we endow our radios with when we want to find a station. So, he built a sensory vest for deaf people. The VEST (short for Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer) translates sounds into vibrations projecting onto the person’s back, enabling them to “hear” vocalization patterns through their skin. Somehow, underneath the stream of consciousness, the brain learns how to interpret these patterns and makes the VEST become a practical utensil. Brain-to-brain interfaces would take it even one step further by bypassing the transduction stage. And this would apply to all kinds of sensory experiences.
The good and the bad about brain-to-brain interfaces
So far, brain-to-brain interfaces sound like incredibly empowering tools. But, of course, there are probably just as many downsides as benefits to this technology. For instance, how will we deal with it when things go wrong? Who will be responsible? Are there going to be privacy regulations to determine who can have access to our thoughts? How hard is it going to be to hack protecting systems? What if criminals get hold of this technology? Will companies be able to access our brains? These are only some of the questions that John Trimper raised in his article on the ethics of brain-to-brain interfaces, referenced here.
And yet, some of the possibilities that this technique would enable are extremely tempting. A few days ago, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain signed a peace treaty known as the “Abraham accord”. If they enabled the opposing parties to feel and think with the enemy, could brain-to-brain interfaces help countries make peace, and how much sooner? We are probably a few decades away from finding out, but in the meantime, it might be worth exploring why and how “second brains” could be our new third eye.
This series features Neuro-Innovation projects created by members of the Unexplored Neuroscience community, with the goal of exploring the intersection between Neuroscience & Innovation within different branches of Neuroscience.
This project was created by Gaia Molinaro (Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc at UCL) in response to the Unexplored Neuroscience project prompt on the BrainNet System, during our month of exploring Cognitive Neuroscience.
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