From rats whose brains have been hardwired together to technology for reading your visual cortex, the possibility of brain-to-brain communication may not be so far-fetched. At Aeon, Peter Watts surveys the latest research, ties it to conjoined twins, and wraps it all up with questions of consciousness.
(And he references Cory’s first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, to boot.) From Aeon:
At Clemson University in South Carolina, Ganesh Venayagamoorthy is busy teaching tame neurons to run everything from power grids to stock markets. DARPA has thrown its weight behind the development of a ‘cortical modem’, a direct neural interface wired right into your gray matter (we’re already using implants to reprogram specific neurons in other primates). But DARPA may have already been scooped by Theodore Berger, down at the University of Southern California. Way back in 2011, he unveiled a kind of artificial, memory-forming hippocampus for rats. The memories encoded in that device can be accessed by the organic rat brain; they can also be ported to other rats. It won’t be long before such prostheses scale up to our own species (that is in fact the explicit goal of Berger’s research).
If the prospect of surgery squicks you out, Sony has registered blue-sky patents for technology that plants sensory input directly into the brain using radio waves and compressed ultrasound. They’re selling it as a great leap forward for everything from gaming to telesurgery. (For my part, I can’t help remembering that neurons fire pretty much the same way whether they’re processing sensory input or religious belief. The difference between instilling sights, sounds, political opinions – why not an irresistible craving for a certain brand of beer? – might come down to little more than where you aim the beam.)
