Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Electronically Linking Rat Brains (Picture of the Day: 3/5/13)

This wire is linking this rat's brain to the brain of another rat. Source

This might be the coolest thing that I have seen come out of science so far. Researchers at the Duke University Medical Center have developed a way for rats to send and receive information directly from their brains. This picture here is basically how they do it. There are two rats, an encoder rat and a decoder rat. Each rat has a bunch of tiny wires attached to the motor sections of their brains. The encoder rat is then given a task (in this case, pushing a lever), when it completes the task correctly, its brain activity is sent into the brain of the decoder rat. After a significant amount of training, the decoder rat was able to hit the correct lever about 70% of the time, strongly indicating that the rats were developing a method of brain-to-brain communication.
Combine this research with the MRIs that can recreate the images we see in our minds and I think there is some strong evidence for a new era of technological growth. Maybe, one day soon, we'll have computers linked directly to our minds.
Read this article to learn more.

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