The first interface "brain-brain" (while in rats)

Miguel Nickelis and Mikhail Lebedev with colleagues from the Department of Neuroscience at Duke University (USA) published a scientific paper describing the world's first interface for transmitting signals from the brain to the brain via the Internet.



The brain-brain interface (BTBI, brain-to-brain interface) provides for the transmission of pulses in electronic form in real time from the brain of one rat to the brain of another rat. In the course of the experiment, the first rat (coder) at Duke University performed sensorimotor tasks, requiring the choice of two options using tactile or visual stimuli. In the process of performing the task by the coder, the samples of brain activity were transmitted to the corresponding areas of the brain of the second rat (decoder) using intracortical stimulations (ICMS). At the same time, the rat decoder was physically located in Brazil.
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The experiment showed that the rat decoder is able to demonstrate behavior based solely on information from the brain of a mouse coder. The diagram shows “feedback” as a reward for the first rat because the second rat successfully completed the task. With the help of such a “feedback”, scientists have established a kind of interactive brain connection between the encoder and the decoder.



Thus, rather complex neural connections are formed in the brain of a rat decoder based on relatively impulses received from the brain of a rat coder. This is a very encouraging result, which can be used as a foundation for new research on the transfer of various information directly from the brain to the brain.

The new interface is a continuation of the previous developments of scientists to create brain-computer interfaces, using which rat neurons were used to control the robot and, conversely, the rat itself can be controlled from a computer program by stimulating the corresponding neurons via a wireless interface.