Science & Technology

Scientists email brainwaves 5,000 miles

By T.K. Randall
August 30, 2014

Image: Backlit Keyboard
Credit: Colin via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) Technology that can pick up and interpret brain waves has been progressing in leaps and bounds lately, with devices that do everything from operating a computer to controlling a mechanical arm being achieved using nothing but the power of the mind.

Now scientists in India have taken things one step further by using one person's brain to send e-mail messages directly to another person's brain several thousand miles away.The international research team achieved the feat by using a special electroencephalography headset to pick up the electrical activity from neurons firing in the brain of a volunteer and to translate the message in to binary. This was then transmitted to another volunteer in France who received it through the electrical stimulation of their own brain by the computer.

For the experiment the words "hola" and "ciao" were e-mailed over 5,000 miles from the sender to the recipient who experienced the message as a series of light flashes in their peripheral vision.

"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," the research team wrote.

Source: Pune Mirror

Tags: Brain, Email