Brain Science

Brain Science — page 3
interface BTB Earlier researchers created brain to machine interfaces that allowed people to use their thoughts to control computers But this was the first time scientists had achieved a BTBI How They Did It The Duke University researchers in North Carolina implanted electricity conducting devices called electrodes into the brain of a rat they called a decoder rat This rat was placed in an enclosure with two levers one of which it could press to receive a sip of water The decoder rat pushed the water lever 50 percent of the time the expected result if the rat was randomly picking a lever Telepathy and the Future Meanwhile a second rat in Brazil the encoder rat Miguel Nicolelis believes the two rats in his experiments worked cooperatively to achieve the lever tasks because each was rewarded sat in an identical enclosure Researchers used light signals to train the encoder to press the water lever The rat pressed the water lever correctly 95 percent of the time Electrodes implanted in its brain recorded electric activity while the rat performed the task The electric activity was converted into signals and sent to a computer to be transmitted over the only when the decoder rat chose the correct lever He believes this principle could be expanded to include several brains cooperating to solve tasks no one person could solve alone in addition if methods of transmitting thoughts without the need to implant electrodes can be perfected he believes this could allow people who do not speak the same language to communicate with their minds People also could telepathically share their thoughts and emotions through the Internet just like they share e mails Internet to the decoder rat s brain When it received the signals the decoder rat pressed the correct lever approximately 70 percent of the time The researchers got the same result when the encoder rat learned to identify the correct lever using touch rather than ight signals 6