Mind Control Robots

One of the most exciting areas of research in the world today is that of Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs). BMIs are the technology that will one day allow amputees to control mechanical limbs with just their thoughts, gamers to shoot each other with the power of their minds and, one day, for us all to upload our consciousness into The Matrix. Although that last example is still a very long way away the first is very much a reality that should be in clinical use by the end of the decade (amazing video here).

Another potential use, as demonstrated in two new, open access papers in Nature's Scientific Reports, is to combine multiple brains into one super powerful shared consciousness. The first paper details four rhesus macaques that had electrodes implanted into their brains in the region responsible for controlling arm movement. Three at a time they trained to move a realistic looking robotic macaque arm. Each monkey was only given control of one of the three axes of movement X, Y or Z forcing them to coordinate together to achieve the task and earn their reward. Each monkey was sat in a separate room and was linked solely to a central computer.

Figure taken from original paper

In the second paper the same team, at Duke University, created what they are calling a brainet by connecting the brains of 3-4 adult rats not only to a central computer but also to each other. They then conducted a series of 4 experiments. One of these involved delivering a physical stimulus to one rat and then using the brainet to transfer this stimulus to a second and third rat. A more ambitious experiment, designed to investigate the potential for organic computers, involved codifying temperature and barometric data from North Carolina and then using the brainet on 3 rats to predict rainfall. They achieved an accuracy of 41% which is much greater than chance alone. We're a long way from organic supercomputers but this is certainly a tentative first step in that direction.