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Category: neuroscience

A new system called BrainNet lets three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface.

This is the first demonstration of two things: a brain-to-brain network of more than two people, and a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain.

“Humans are social beings who communicate with each other to cooperate and solve problems that none of us can solve on our own,” says corresponding author Rajesh Rao, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and a co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington.

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University of Washington researchers created a method for two people help a third person solve a task using only their minds. Heather Wessel, a recent UW graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology (left), and Savannah Cassis, a UW undergraduate in psychology (right) sent information about a Tetris-like game from their brains over the internet to UW psychology graduate student Theodros Haile’s brain. Haile could then manipulate the game with his mind. Mark Stone/University of Washington.

Telepathic communication might be one step closer to reality thanks to new research from the University of Washington. A team created a method that allows three people to work together to solve a problem using only their minds.

In BrainNet, three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface. This is the first demonstration of two things: a brain-to-brain network of more than two people, and a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain. The team published its results April 16 in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, though this research previously attracted media attention after the researchers posted it September to the preprint site arXiv.

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The most probable mainstream non-invasive way to transfer human consciousness in the intermediate future, with initial stages in the 2030s, could be the convergence of optogenetics, nanotechnologies, neuroengineering, Cloud exocortex and an array of neurotechnologies allowing to connect our wetware directly to the Cloud.

Initially, each of us will have a personal exocortex in the Cloud, the third non-biological “de-cerebral” hemisphere, which will be in constant communication with the other two biological brain hemispheres.

At some point, this “third hemisphere,” will have a threshold information content and intimate knowledge of your biology, personality and other physical world attributes in order to seamlessly integrate with your persona as a holistic entity.

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21st Century Medicine (21CM) is a cryobiology research company whose core mission is to develop a cryopreservation protocol sufficiently benign that whole, donated human organs could be vitrified (stored below −130 degrees Celsius without ice formation) and rewarmed when needed for transplantation –an incredibly ambitious goal that has so far eluded medical researchers. 21CM’s scientists are the original pioneers of whole organ vitrification and have been diligently working on the technique for decades. A significant milestone of their progress toward that goal is their demonstration work on rabbit kidneys. Two of their most relevant publications are “Cryopreservation of organs by vitrification: perspectives and recent advances” (Fahy, Wowk, Wu, Phan, Rasch, Chang & Zendejas 2004) and “Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification” (Fahy, Wowk, Pagotan, Chang, Phan, Thomson & Phan 2009). These papers are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in just how difficult it is to cryopreserve large organs (and by extension whole animals) for long-term storage with the intent on later recovery of biological function. In short, it is incredibly difficult but progress is slowly being made.

The state-of-the-art whole organ vitrification techniques developed by 21CM are the basis of the human cryopreservation protocols used by some cryonics companies (e.g. Alcor). This is made clear in Alcor’s 2004 publication in the New York Academy of Sciences “The Arrest of Biological Time as a Bridge to Engineered Negligible Senescence” (Lemler, Harris, Platt & Huffman 2004).

21CM has been an official competitor in our Brain Preservation Prize competition since 2012. They actually have two separate preservation techniques competing for our prize: the “straight” cryopreservation\cryonics technique described on this page, and a radically new technique called “Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation” (ASC), described on a separate page,which they developed to overcome the “tissue shrinkage” issues described on this page and to optimize ultrastructure preservation at the expense of viability.

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With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart. But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pretty much every other type of organism on Earth.

Rather than a centralised nervous system such as vertebrates have, two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are spread throughout its body, distributed between its arms. And now scientists have determined that those neurons can make decisions without input from the brain.

“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor,” said neuroscientist David Gire of the University of Washington.

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