Findings of a new research have pointed towards better functioning when two brains are connected together to perform certain tasks rather than one.
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“This is the first demonstration of a shared brain-machine interface, a paradigm that has been translated successfully over the past decades from studies in animals all the way to clinical applications”, study co-author Miguel Nicolelis, a co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering at the Duke University School of Medicine, said in a press release. Multiple brains. Some researchers at Duke University have announced they have done almost that, by wiring animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks.
When electrodes were implanted into the brains of rhesus macaques linking their minds, the animals learned to coordinate the activity of their neurons to move a virtual arm in 3D. Under some conditions, the authors observed that the rat Brainet could perform at the same level or better than one rat on its own. For example, by delivering electrical pulse patterns derived from a digital image, they recorded the electrical outputs and measured how well the network of neurons processed that image. Once groups of three or four rats were interconnected, the researchers delivered prescribed electrical pulses to individual rats, portions of the group, or the whole group, and recorded the outputs. In another test, the researchers delivered information about barometric pressure and temperature and the brain network computed the probability of rain.
When the tasks required multiple computations, the Brainet performance was significantly better compared to individual rats. What the monkeys were supposed to do was to control the arm, directing it toward a target like a boat crew rows forward.
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are computational systems that allow subjects to use their brain signals to directly control the movements of artificial devices, such as robotic arms, exoskeletons or virtual avatars. But this is the first time that anybody has directly wired together multiple brains to complete a task-a so-called brain-to-brain interface.
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The monkeys could achieve coordinated control only when at least two of them synchronized their brains to produce continuous 3-D signals that moved the virtual arm. For their study, the scientists are trying to develop “organic computers” by interconnecting pairs of brains of monkeys and rats. When the monkeys got the arm to hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. The monkeys were each separated in different rooms but were able to communicate and share brain activity related to senses and movements.
