
Transmitting binary information from one person’s brain to another - holasnic
http://www.newsweek.com/emailing-your-brainwaves-future-communication-266155
======
patio11
This -- or future developments in the area -- is of greatest possible interest
to people who are profoundly disabled and may be incapable of communicating
but remain at some level of capability/consciousness. Even a lossy, slow
method of getting information in/out of them lets them participate in their
own medical care (e.g. "Do you perceive pain?" " _Yyyy_ " "I'm sorry about
that. I'll adjust your medication.") and continue interacting with their loved
ones.

~~~
mechanical_fish
A quick search for "locked-in syndrome" turns up this citation:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16186044](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16186044)

"It has been shown that more than half of the time it is the family and not
the physician who first realized that the patient was aware. Distressingly,
recent studies reported that the diagnosis of LIS on average takes over 2.5
months. In some cases it took 4-6 years before aware and sensitive patients,
locked in an immobile body, were recognized as being conscious."

~~~
hawkice
Based on the Glasgow Coma Scale, people with Locked-In Syndrome _are also in
comas, technically_. Figuring it out seems remarkably hard, and is almost
certainly wildly under-detected. I'd be interested to see if we are able to
use tools like this to discover whether our assumptions about comatose states
are at all accurate.

Also, of course, the obvious Inception-oriented ideas would be good to test
out as well.

~~~
aperrien
You know, I've always wondered why, in edge cases like this, it's not standard
to run the patients through fMRI to detect whether or not the patient is
actually _conscious_ before just consigning them to a bed with no interaction.
Or am I mistaken, and this is routinely done?

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's not that simple, at all. From my Pinboard archives (what would I do
without Pinboard?):

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-
anesthesi...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesia-
can-teach-us-about-consciousness.html?_r=0)

 _For every 1,000 people who undergo general anesthesia, there will be one or
two who are not as unconscious as they seem — people who remember their
doctors talking, and who are aware of the surgeon’s knife, even while their
bodies remain catatonic and passive. For the unlucky 0.13 percent for whom
anesthesia goes awry, there’s not really a good preventive. That’s because
successful anesthetization requires complete unconsciousness, and
consciousness isn’t something we can measure._

Here we have a much more common problem than locked-in syndrome, a problem
which anesthesiologists have been studying since before their job had a name,
but we can't even solve _that_ because we don't even have a decent working
definition of what we mean by "consciousness" in these contexts, let alone
what we can measure to determine someone's "consciousness". It's an active
field of research, which is a fine thing to remember whenever we start getting
too high on science fiction:

[http://www.xkcd.com/1345/](http://www.xkcd.com/1345/)

------
Pwnguinz
Here's the direct link to the PLOS One journal article:
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0105225#pone-0105225-g001)

EDIT: A better summary is available below from jawns.

~~~
jawns
The Newsweek headline is pretty misleading, although the study lends itself to
being misread.

It looks as though the "emitter" of information (the person who begins the
communication) used two different motor movements -- one that represents a 1
and the other that represents a 0 -- to communicate a stream of binary
information. An EEG picked up those motor-based signals from the subject's
brain.

Then that binary information was sent to another location, where transcranial
magnetic stimulation was used on the "receivers," who sensed the 1s as visual
stimuli and the 0s as no visual stimuli. After each bit was communicated, they
told the researchers whether they saw any visual stimuli.

In other words, the "emitter" didn't just think of a word and that word
somehow magically popped into the heads of the receivers. We're a loooooong
way off from that.

In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words
like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant
in terms of what was actually achieved.

Really, the best way to sum this up is:

Binary information is transmitted with significant accuracy using non-invasive
neural sensors (for detection) and non-invasive neural stimuli (for
reception).

And indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that neither the accurate detection of
binary signals using EEG nor the accurate communication of binary signals
using TMS is particularly groundbreaking ... in which case, the only thing
novel about this study is that the researchers decided to pair the two.

EDIT: Actually, the paper seems to be implying that accurate communication of
binary signals in a computer-to-brain interface is indeed groundbreaking (From
the introduction: "the realization of non-invasive CBI in humans remains
elusive") but if that were so, one would think that the EEG component of the
study introduces needlessly complexity; the researchers could just as easily
begin with a predefined stream of 1s and 0s, rather than trying to extract
them from someone else's brain.

~~~
legomylibrum
>In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words
like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant
in terms of what was actually achieved.

You're absolutely right; this study is neither novel nor groundbreaking.

On the sending side, forget 90%, success rates of 99% are easy to achieve with
some types of BCI systems such as SSVEP or P300. As for the information
detected, you might have heard of the P300 speller[1] which demonstrated an
easy way to accurately spell out words using a BCI headset.

On the receiving side we see why they opted for binary communication. The
'telepathy' was nothing more than a flash of light being visible for a value
of '1', achieved by blasting a region of the brain associated with vision with
magnetic fields about as strong as an MRI. That sounds cool, but it is a
technique that has been in use for over a decade[2].

So tl;dr, what these researchers have achieved is essentially stringing
together two or three decades-old technologies in a not terribly original way.

[1]: [http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Applications/Brain-
Computer-...](http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Applications/Brain-Computer-
Interface/g-BCIsys/BCI-Examples/P300-Speller) [2]:
[http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.long](http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.long)

------
angersock
Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.

Not okay. Direct brain interfaces, as cool as they are, make me super-nervous
if I'm hooked up to anything not 100% in my control. We can't even keep
Windows XP boxes from getting rooted--what chance does a person have?

~~~
endtime
I upvoted you to try to bring you out of the gray because I think you're
making a useful point (though I don't think your tone is effective, which is
probably why you got downvoted).

Write access to minds is, uh, pretty serious. And we generally suck at writing
secure software. So yeah, this is scary. As much as I love the idea of this
tech, and want to live in a world where it's ubiquitous and safe and we don't
need screens or keyboards etc., I'm not going to be beta testing any of this
stuff.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
i have write access to your mind write now! not so bad, is it?

once you learn not to put extreme trust into anything you think, it won't feel
so bothersome. it'll probably help us trust each other more.

~~~
endtime
You have _extremely limited_ write access to my mind - text over the internet
is not a particular high-bandwidth or invasive channel. Short of some kind of
neurolinguistic programming (which AFAIK isn't really a thing), the worst
anyone can do is offend me.

Direct electric stimulation is a pretty different beast. I am normally all for
deconstructing arbitrary distinctions, but I don't think this one is
arbitrary. There is a qualitative difference between reading text and having
my brain internals directly manipulated by electrical impulses.

~~~
mindcrime
It is not important that you think of pink elephants right now. Or, even, if
you can, then, remember a time when you might have thought of a pink elephant?
And how the pink elephant made you feel, and then remember a future where
you've been thinking about pink elephants for some time. Kind of amazing isn't
it, how you came to think of a pink elephant that time? It's kind of warm,
fuzzy, comforting pink feeling, just washing pink warmness all over your body
and bathing you in the comforting embrace when you think of a pink elephant.

~~~
endtime
Yes, you can make me think about pink elephants (though I'm not convinced you
can make me associate them with a warm fuzzy feeling). But you can't change my
values or my memories by writing me a paragraph like that. You could if you
kidnapped and brainwashed me, but that's also something I plan to avoid. It is
precisely because my mind is vulnerable and malleable that I want to limit
other people's write access to it.

My house has windows, and you can see in, and you can put up a poster outside
my window and I might see and read it and think about something. That's not
the same as letting you walk into my house and touch me (or remote control my
toilets or whatever).

~~~
mindcrime
It was worth a try! :-)

All joking aside, the mention of NLP above reminded me of some stuff I'd read
a while back. I'm fairly skeptical of NLP, but I can see how some of those
techniques might have a certain sort of value.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
they work really well on people who believe they work. they don't work at all
on people who dismiss them.

funny, that.

------
MarkPNeyer
i can't wait for the first telepathic social network!

i had a psychotic break in 2012 and believed that i was on such a thing -
like, i thought it already existed and i was given beta access. i wasn't sure
how else to explain it. i could 'talk' with other people just by thinking
about them, or set them up for conversations with each other. it was pretty
cool.

------
Tangokat
"Finally, we anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will
interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both
computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely."

Pretty interesting, history shows that tech gets cheaper and easier over time.
If this is also the case here this could change communication as we know it.

By the way, given Newsweeks recent history with the bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto
fiasco maybe just link the original source? It seems to be freely available
[1].

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0105225#pone-0105225-g001)

------
famblycat
I wonder what the implications of a direct brain-to-computer interface, and
through that, the internet, are if this interface is left on while you sleep.
Would your unconscious mind wander out into the internet? What would it do
there?

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pweissbrod
While people futz with their text messages, their facebook, their google, it
is telepathy - the ultimate means of knowledge transfer and communication that
we seek.

If/when wireless telepathy becomes a feasible technique it would be a
breakthrough of greater significance than the internet

------
the_cat_kittles
i understand the greater point of this, but its funny to me to think that we
already have api's for this (sight, sound, mainly) and these guys just forgot
to read the docs

~~~
dwild
Theses API are broken on some of us.

------
Estragon
If something this sexy only made it into PLoS One, either it can't be that
good or the authors have some ideological commitment to PLoS One's publishing
values.

------
kszx
Step 1: Include the brain wave scanner in future Oculus VR devices.

Step 2: Use virtual reality as the interface for brain-to-computer, brain-to-
internet, and brain-to-brain communication.

Step 3: Considering the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook, make these types of
communication available on Facebook.

~~~
kszx
By the way, you will get a free Oculus device if you allow it to handle
internet-to-brain communication: "Indirect" advertising (through text, video
etc.) is a thing of the past. Long live "direct" advertising -- projected
right into the brain.

------
BWStearns
This article is unreadable on mobile. Anyone getting it working?

------
claar
Sure, if you define "words" as a binary "did you see lights?" question.

See jawns comment for what this study was actually about; certainly not the
transmission of actual words. Deceptive headline and article.

EDIT: After reading the linked study, I was too harsh; they did actually
transmit the words (with a 2-11% error rate) via this binary "lights"
mechanism, so you could use such a mechanism to communicate in Morse code.
Just not for the sort of subliminal communication inferred in the article.

