Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer
Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer
14:38 09 July 2015 by Jessica Hamzelou
Two heads are better than one, and three monkey brains
can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, a team
has networked the brains of multiple animals to form a living computer that can
perform tasks and solve problems.
If human brains could be similarly connected, it might
give us superhuman problem-solving abilities, and allow us to communicate
abstract thoughts and experiences. "It is really exciting," says Iyad
Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in Dubai, UAE, who was not involved in the work.
"It will change the way humans cooperate."
The work, published today, is an advance on standard
brain-machine interfaces – devices that have enabled people and animals to
control machines and prosthetic limbsMovie Camera by thought alone. These tend
to work by converting the brain's electrical activity into signals that a
computer can interpret.
Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center in
Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues wanted to extend the idea by
incorporating multiple brains at once. The team connected the brains of three
monkeys to a computer that controlled an animated screen image representing a
robotic arm, placing electrodes into brain areas involved in movement.
By synchronising their thoughts, the monkeys were able to
move the arm to reach a target – at which point the team rewarded them with
juice.
Brainet
Then the team made things trickier: each monkey could
only control the arm in one dimension, for example. But the monkeys still
managed to make the arm reach the target by working together. "They
synchronise their brains and they achieve the task by creating a superbrain – a
structure that is the combination of three brains," says Nicolelis. He
calls the structure a "brainet".
These monkeys were connected only to a computer, not one
another, but in a second set of experiments, the team connected the brains of
four rats to a computer and to each other. Each rat had two sets of electrodes
implanted in regions of the brain involved in movement control – one to
stimulate the brain and another to record its activity.
The team sent electrical pulses to all four rats and
rewarded them when they synchronised their brain activity. After 10 training
sessions, the rats were able to do this 61 per cent of the time. This
synchronous brain activity can be put to work as a computer to perform tasks
like information storage and pattern recognition, says Nicolelis. "We send
a message to the brains, the brains incorporate that message, and we can
retrieve the message later," he says.
This is the way parallel processing works in computing,
says Rahwan. "In order to synchronise, the brains are responding to each
other," he says. "So you end up with an input, some kind of
computation, and an output – what a computer does." Dividing the computing
of a task between multiple brains is similar to sharing computations between
multiple processors in modern computers, he says.
Bypassing language
"This is incredible," says Andrea Stocco at the
University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the project.
"We are sampling different neurons from different animals and putting them
together to create a superorganism."
Things could get even more interesting once we are able
to connect human brains. This will probably only be possible when better
non-invasive methods for monitoringMovie Camera and stimulating the brain have
been developed.
"Once brains are connected, applications become just
a matter of what different animals can do," says Stocco. All anyone can
probably ask of a monkey is to control movement, but we can expect much more
from human minds, he says.
A device that allows information transfer between brains could,
in theory, allow us to do away with language – which plays the role of a
"cumbersome and difficult-to-manage symbolic code", Stocco says.
"I could send thoughts from my brain to your brain
in a way not represented by sounds or words," says Andrew Jackson at
Newcastle University, UK. "You could envisage a world where if I wanted to
say 'let's go to the pub', I could send that thought to your brain," he
says. "Although I don't know if anyone would want that. I would rather
link my brain to Wikipedia."
The ability to share abstract thoughts could enable us to
solve more complex problems. "Sometimes it's really hard to collaborate if
you are a mathematician and you're thinking about very complex and abstract
objects," says Stocco. "If you could collaboratively solve common
problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of
different individuals for a common goal."
Collective surgery
This might be a way to perform future surgery, says
Stocco. At present, when a team of surgeons is at work, only one will tend to
have control of the scalpel at any moment. Imagine if each member of the team
could focus on a particular aspect of the operation and coordinate their brain
power to collectively control the procedure. "We are really far away from
that scenario, but Nicolelis's work opens up all those possibilities for the
first time, which is exciting," he says.
But there is a chance that such scenarios won't improve
on current performance, Stocco says. Jason Ritt of Boston University agrees.
"In principle we could communicate information much faster [with a
brainet] than with vision and language, but there's a really high bar," he
says. "Our ability to communicate with technology is still nowhere near
our ability to communicate with speech."
The ability to share our thoughtsMovie Camera and brain
power could also leave us vulnerable to new invasions of privacy, warns Rahwan.
"Once you create a complex entity [like a brainet], you have to ensure
that individual autonomy is protected," he says. It might be possible, for
example, for one brain to manipulate others in a network.
There's also a chance that private thoughts might slip
through along with ones to be shared, such as your intentions after drinking
with someone you invited to the pub, says Nicholas Hatsopoulos at the
University of Chicago in Illinois. "It might be a little scary," he
says. "There are lots of thoughts that we have that we wouldn't want to
share with others."
In the meantime, Nicolelis, who also develops
exoskeletons that help people with spinal cord injuries regain movement, hopes
to develop the technology trialled in monkeys for paraplegic people. He hopes
that a more experienced user of a prosthetic limbMovie Camera or wheelchair,
for example, might be able to collaborate with a less experienced user to
directly train them to control it for themselves.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI:
10.1038/srep11869 and 10.1038/srep10767
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