Scientists Gain Success In Brain-to-brain Communication Among Rats (+VIDEO)

Scientists led by Miguel Nicolelis from the Duke University are conducting the brain-machine interface research to develop a brain-controlled exoskeleton that would allow a paralyzed person to walk onto the field and kick a soccer ball at the opening ceremony of next year’s World Cup in Brazil. Their last achievement is that they managed to create a computational unit out of two brains: they have wired the brains of two rats together and shown that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem. The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through the electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information from brain to brain even worked with two rats separated by a long distance, one in a lab in North Carolina and another in a lab in Brazil. Nicolelis claims, that the brain-to-brain communication link enables the rats  compute by mutual experience. Scientists hope their findings could show the way to future therapies aimed at restoring movement or language after a stroke or other brain injury by using signals from a healthy part of the brian to retrain the injured area. Though some scientists are sceptical about these findings. Bijan Pesaran, a neuroscientist from New York University, would like to see the researchers extend the experiment to check, if the rats on the receiving end of the brain-to-brain communication link could improve their performance even more. Pesaran claims he’s open to the idea that brain-to-brain communication could one day be used to rehabilitate brain injury patients, but it might be possible to accomplish this by stimulating the injured brain with computer-generated patterns of activity. You can learn more about the research at nature.com