'Telepathy' Experiment Sends 1st Mental Message

 A good start.  Better yet it appears to be the beginning of a protocol that may allow an internal computer screen with a key board.  I would just like to pop up a screen in front of me and then do virtual typing and coding.  This would still be a tool divorced from biological processes.

It appears likely that we once biologically accessed and shared images rather than words before this was literally turned off 45,000 years ago.  This is a function used by animals as well.

Thus we can expect an augmented human in our future that both naturally shares images and also interprets thoughts through a virtual screen.  Early indications suggests that hanging a powerful magnet around your throat may help.  The experiment has not been done yet.

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'Telepathy' experiment sends 1st mental message 

http://news.yahoo.com/telepathy-experiment-sends-1st-mental-message-222701481.html

Washington (AFP) - For the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of miles apart in India and France.

Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person's brain to another's even, as in this case, if they are thousands of miles away.

"It is kind of technological realization of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, told AFP by phone from Barcelona.

"We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain."

For the experiment, one person wearing a wireless, Internet-linked electroencephalogram or EEG would think a simple greeting, like "hola," or "ciao."

A computer translated the words into digital binary code, presented by a series of 1s or 0s.

Then, this message was emailed from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who through non-invasive brain stimulation could see flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message.

"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. 

"One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"

Ruffini added that extra care was taken to make sure no sensory information got in the way that could have influenced the interpretation of the message.

Researchers have been attempting to send a message from person to person this way for about a decade, and the proof of principle that was reported in the journal PLOS ONE is still rudimentary, he told AFP.

"We hope that in the longer term this could radically change the way we communicate with each other," said Ruffini.