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A study shows it’s possible to transmit a thought from one person to another, without having to speak or write. The research team consisted of members from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Harvard Medical School (HMC), Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg in France.
The findings were published in PLOS ONE.

The scientists used two brain technologies, Electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted, imageguided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to send messages via the Internet between two intact scalps of human subjects. The messages were send from 5000 miles apart, one person was located in India and the other ones in France.

Four volunteers aged between 28 and 50 took part in various experiments. One person was the sender who was based in India, and the other three were message receivers located in France. The EEG picked up the thoughts (such as ‘hello’) from the sender that were then send as a binary code by the brain-computer interface in an email to France.

In France, the computer-brain interface translated the thoughts into signals. The signals were transferred through the receiver’s scalps using robotized TMS. The volunteers described the brain stimulations as flashes of light, which decoded the thoughts into messages.

According to Professor Pascual-Leone, the Internet could be an appropriate pathway to discover the possibility to send messages between two people by reading out brain activity from one into the other. The researchers believe that the research results are of relevance to further research on the possibilities of communicating without the use of writing, language or gestures.

Source: PLOS ONE.