From the Vault: Techno-Telepathy

You've always wanted to meet a sensitive alien telepath who could understand you like no one else, but SETI is really dropping the ball on your galactic personal ad. Could new technologies that push the frontiers of brain science allow telepathic communication between humans? Join Robert and Joe as they make a case for the slogan, 'Talk is cheap. Scan me!' (Previosuly published Dec. 22, 2015)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
The vault door is open. Will you go in? That's right,
It's it's a perfect day to say, rewatch David Cronenberg
Scanners or listen to this episode on Technotal Epathy in
which we reference scanners probably way too many times now.
One thing I do want to clarify because people have

(00:27):
been asking about this. Some people are like, hey, why
are you doing reruns lately? Aren't you doing new episodes?
We should be clear. I hope you're getting all of
the new episodes we're releasing just as many original episodes
as always. That has not changed. Uh. These Saturday Vault
selections are in addition to our regular lineup, so you
are not missing out on any new stuff to Blow

(00:47):
your Mind content. If you're not getting our new regular
episodes on Tuesday and Thursday, check your feed or use
a different way of getting to them. Yeah, and by
all means note the original publication date because you know,
a lot of these topics do involve scientific stories and
scientific findings, but in general, if there's something major that
has changed, we will either not rerun it, or we'll

(01:10):
make sure to clue you into what has occurred, or
we'll be oblivious and hear about it from you later exactly,
and then we'll just that's just part of the fan conversation.
So it's all good either way. So this episode was
originally called Brain to Brain The Science of Techno Telepathy,
and it aired on December twenty two, so it's a
couple of years old now, but I think this one

(01:32):
still holds up. It's still an interesting and developing topic
in neuroscience and neuro technology, and I especially would like
to revisit this idea sometime in the future with reference
to the ideas of neuro security that we discussed in
in another episode from a while back. So anyway, I
hope you enjoy the Science of Techno Telepathy. Welcome to

(01:56):
Stuff to blow your mind from housetop works dot com.
I would like to scan all of them in this room,
one at a time. I must remind you that the
scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds,

(02:18):
ear aches, stomach cramps. Wait, wait, joke, You can't just
scan everybody in the room. Well why not? Will did
you get everyone to sign those consent forms? I figured
they show up for a press conference, they must be
game for a little till episode. But they might have
pre existing health conditions. I mean, you just warned them
that they might get cramps and nose bleeds, you know,

(02:40):
mild nosebleeds. I mean, we're not gonna catch anybody on
fire or any What about their mental health? What about
their privacy, the right, the right of freedom of thought
and the deliberate communication. Well, that's not what this experiment
is about. And that doesn't even touch on the fact
that you can scan their smartphones and laptops with your mind.
I mean, that's not quite as bad as peering into
their private thoughts, dreams, and bears. But nobody wants that either. Geez, Robert,

(03:04):
I was really looking forward to this, and I have
to report that you are now being a major buzz kill. Hey,
I'm sorry, I knew you are. I know you are
a bit of migraine forming here. Okay, I'm good. That

(03:26):
was a close one. Hey, you welcome to stuff to
blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And if you haven't guessed already today we're
going to be talking about telepathy scanning, as it's often
called in the literature. Yes, yes, I imagine a number
of you identified our homage there to uh to David
Cronenberg's sci fi classics Scanners. You know, what I found

(03:49):
out just this week is that Scanners has a huge,
uh catalog of sequels I was unaware of. I knew
there was a Scanners too that's got some corrupt police
commissioner with an army of Scanners, but there's a Scanners
three that has a scene where a woman makes a
pigeon blow up with her mind. And then I had
no idea about this until you told me. But there's

(04:10):
a spinoff series called Scanner Cop Scanner Top one and
then Scanner Cop two, which is also sometimes essentially Scanners four,
depending on which a version of the at least you're
looking at. You know. One of the funny things about
the development of the Scanners series, at least as far
as I can tell, I haven't watched all of the movies,
that the most of the sequels look quite bad. But

(04:34):
there is a sort of slow development or escalation of
the powers that are attributed to Scanners. I can remember
in the first movie, you can read somebody's thoughts, and
you can also sort of I think, plant implant thoughts
to a certain extent um, And then of course you
can cause the resident frequency cascade that makes their head

(04:54):
blow up, right, and I think you can make fire,
and you can you can well then also there's at
least um I don't want to give too many spoilers,
but it's at least mentioned that you might be able
to absorb another individual's mind state into your own. Okay,
so that's pretty goadline. It's getting pretty weird even in
the first movie. But later on you add what would
conventionally be called telekinesis where you're throwing things around, you

(05:16):
throw people across the room, So you're just generally developing
psychic powers. Yeah, it goes into that realm of essentially
magic pan psychic sorcery. But telepathy is something that I
can understand why that happens, because it's a concept that
I thought. I think it's been interpreted in various ways

(05:38):
that are often quite vague. So as much as I
hate to go to the dictionary at the beginning of
a discussion, I do think it's helpful to get a
specified common definition on the table for telepathy, and I
want to go with one included in Miriam Webster, which
it just says communication from one mind to another by
extra sensory means. So I think that's what we're gonna

(06:01):
be talking about today. It's sharing ideas. It's communication without
using any of the senses, because we're using our our
senses and our our language abilities or vocal abilities right now. Yeah,
we're engaging in a in in in a communication, in
a communal thought process. Yeah, like right now, a man
walks into a bar and there's a duck on the bar.

(06:23):
I just put that image into your head. I just
put that image into everyone's head. I essentially use my
scanner powers on everyone listening to this podcast. But there
was a fidelity copying problem there because when I pictured
in my brain, what I pictured was a swan. And
that sort of gets to the basic problem of communication.
One of the reasons we often imagine the idea of

(06:43):
telepathy as we defined it for the purpose of this
episode communication without words or any of the normal sensory means,
is that those normal canonical means of communication are highly flawed,
like our ability to use them is far from perfect.
Just think how often there's a conflict in your life
because somebody took something that you said or wrote the

(07:06):
wrong way, or because or because you don't know how
to interpret what somebody has said or wrote. If only
you could truly understand what their intentions and feelings about
the subject really were without everything being garbled through this
language transmission mediator, then then things would seem to be
a lot easier, right, Yeah. I mean there's a study

(07:28):
that came out earlier this year talking about how there
I think they were mainly looking at, you know, situations
between spouses where individuals have known each other for an
extended period of time. They've they have this this this
long relationship and this collaboration going on, and you would think, oh, well,
they're they've been they've been together so long, they totally

(07:49):
understand each other. They can totally read each other's intents,
and they know what the other person wants in values.
But this particular study found there's kind of the the
opposite in many cases, because you end up having an
idea in your head of what that other individual wants
and needs and it may not actually be accurate, but
you're no longer feeling it out as much anymore, because

(08:11):
it's you feel like it's written in stone. Yeah, like
everything you say, because I know you, I'm interpreting through
the lens of what I think about Robert. So even
though all you said was hey can you can you
grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I'm thinking,
why is he asking for a Satanic ritual? Yeah? Yeah,

(08:34):
there's just so much that can that can become lost
and ambiguous and just misinterpreted entirely. Of course, most of
us are familiar with telepathy from fiction. That's when we
started off with an example from a fictional sci fi
horror movie. Uh and and certainly fiction gives us plenty
of wonderful, rich examples uh and some more thoughtful than others. Yeah. Yeah,

(08:56):
of course, there's like the shining in the Shining, you know,
the title of The Shining refers to this this uh
sort of telepathic ability, though it seems to extend beyond
just communication. Telepathy is more just like we've mentioned earlier,
the general psychic awareness, being able to sense things that
are beyond what we can normally see with our see

(09:18):
or here since is, yes, they have a sensory it's
like they have a sensory ability that everyone has, but
there's this amped up to an incredible level, so they're
constantly bombarded with the signals. You can finally hear the
red rum resolve from the background noise. Yeah. Another one
that comes to my mind is I assume you've seen
The Dark Crystal, right, and do you remember the guelf

(09:38):
Lin dream Fast in that vaguely? That's uh, that's when
Jin and Kira, I believe, the two gelf Liings meet
and the sort of they kind of have this mind
meld moment where they share visions of their childhood, right,
they share their memories. It seems like it's been a
while since I've seen the movie, but it is a
great movie. And what I remember is that they just
sort of download their memories directly from one another, so

(10:03):
you can suddenly remember the other one's life. Another one,
of course, is Box Vulcan mind meld in Star Trek,
and that seems also kind of like the dream Fast
from what I recalled that it's not just like a
single coded message being traded between minds, but it's like
I've got your consciousness in me now. Yeah? Is that

(10:23):
is that pretty much? Right? Yeah? I believe. So it's
it's it's been Hanstin's I've seen any trek with actual
mind melding moments. But yeah, alright, well a few that
came to my mind. Well, first of all, uh, I
was wondering, do you think that the spice orgies and
doone count? There's it's not directly mentioned as I recall that,
and I could be wrong on this, that there's a
telepathic link, And certainly I think the spice is going

(10:47):
to affect individuals and you know, varying levels. Well, this
is a problem I've read about in some of the
skeptical literature on telepathy is that it's difficult to tell
the difference between different types of extra sense reperception that
people have claimed. So how can you tell the functional
difference between telepathy and precognition, or telepathy and clairvoyance? Yeah,

(11:10):
I mean so I think that comes through in Dune.
Our trouble here may just be that there's general psychic
hyper awareness. Can you tell the difference between am I
reading your mind or am I standing atop the dune
viewing the great order of the universe? And one of
the things I gain awareness of is what you would

(11:30):
be thinking or saying yes, yeah, A good point. Another
one that comes to mind, This one's hot on uh
in my memory since I just watched the whole thing.
But then the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones has the
villain Purple Man Zebediah Killgrave and fabulous, uh, fabulous villain
that uses mind control. What he but what he commands

(11:52):
you to do you want to do. You don't just
turn into a zombie. They use a nice exploration of
this to where if he puts an impulse in your mind,
like that the thing you want. So that's not just communication,
that's full online control. Yeah, but it's it kind of
leaks into some of the stuff we're gonna talk later,
and that he kind of it's kind of I get
the impression that kill Grave he's kind of temporarily thinking

(12:14):
with your brain. And so he's thinking with your brain
and giving you, you know, something to to want, something
to believe in that you know or desire that you
normally would not. Well, that blurs a line that will
become important later in this episode when we talked about
scientific studies. Yeah, indeed and uh. And another thing about
kill Grave is that you know it raises the question

(12:34):
that if there's an outside force making you want or
believe something temporarily, and then that a force eventually you know,
it's it's influence is gone, how does that affect what
you're going to believe or want in the long term?
You know, like, how does that memory and form? Can
you remember that you wanted something but recognize that it
was not original to your mind? Yeah? Indeed, so I

(12:56):
thought that was a There was some some excellent explorations
of that in that particular show um in the vampire
in the vampire novel by John Steckley Vampires where the
s is a dollar sign, which was adapted into John
Carpenter's movie. But believe me, the book is so Yeah
that the book is really really frightening and terrifying and

(13:17):
the just hideous. Yeah. But the vampires in the book
they engage in in mind control that's very similar to
to kill Gray and from the world of Dungeons and Dragons.
I feel like I need to mention just a couple
of species real quick. There's of course the meld communal
meditation of the fungal my conid species. You know, shambling
fungus people benevolent that live in the under Dark, but yeah,

(13:38):
they engage in a kind of communal meditation. And then
also they're the hive mind college colonies of the alipid
mind flares, and there of course just catastrophically evil uh beings,
and they're using all a bit just about every shade
of of psychic power and telepathic power to to work
their evil schemes. The under Duck they strike terror just

(14:02):
by directly transmitting the pages of the Monster Manual to
feature them into your brain. Yeah, and and they also
it's like a whole host of under dark creatures in Dungeon.
Dragons are are weird and twisted and horrible because the
mind players use their abilities to enslave their species in
a in an earlier times. So yeah, it seems to
me that in all these different conceptions of telepathy from fiction,

(14:25):
you can basically break them down into two different categories
of communication, linguistic and non linguistic. So even the linguistic version,
of course, is not involving written or spoken words, but
it's silent internal brain to brain communication without the senses
that still somehow seems to be mediated through language, Like

(14:48):
you hear a voice inside your head communicating with you
through words or some other type of structured coded message.
Then there's non linguistic telepathy, and that's commune mucation that's
not mediated by language. And I think this is more
difficult to represent in fiction, but it's the kind we
see more often because it's the kind that's even stranger

(15:10):
to to to reality. You know, it's one thing to
send a message into somebody's brain. You could accomplish almost
the same thing by them just having a tiny earpiece,
you know, and talking into a microphone. But it's a
different thing to download somebody's memories or to uh or
to experience uncoded conceptual thought like the guelf link dream

(15:33):
fast I was talking about. And that second kind, I
think is it may end up introducing some conceptual problems
with the concept of telepathy that we can talk about
more once we look at the science. But so today
we're gonna be talking primarily about technologically enabled brain to
brain communication or technologically enabled telepathy, because we we should

(15:55):
at least give a brief nod to the concept of
paranormal telepathy. I don't think we need to spend a
lot of time on this because I think by and large,
our listeners are are scientific skeptics of one kind or another. Yeah,
I mean, there have been studies into paranormal telepathy, of course,
and we could go through all all those here today,
but I think we pretty much decided that this would

(16:16):
this would take time away from the more pressing studies
we're going to discuss regarding technological telepathy. Yes, so we'll
just say very briefly that the scientific community has not
been convinced that there's ever been any good evidence of
telepathy from properly controlled studies. Lots of people have claimed
to find evidence of telepathy, but usually when you look
at these studies, they're not double blinded, they're not being

(16:38):
carried out with the kind of strict rigor you expect
if you want to get a scientific result that that
you can feel confidence in. Yeah. So, so, by and large,
we have not seen any convincing evidence that paranormal telepathy exists.
There doesn't seem to be any known mechanism of action
for that, so we will leave that to the side
for today. Yeah, because when it comes to brain to

(16:59):
brain communication, we have all of these other wonderful systems
and and equally, I mean even more mind blowing than
than than brains sending little waves because we're communicating with language.
We're communicating with all the various expressions and micro expressions
that are that are rippling across this facial communication ray
that we all have. Yeah, it's one of those things

(17:20):
that's uh, it can seem kind of silly to say
it now, but really just take a second and try
to step back from human experience and feel the weirdness
of language. It's language is totally normal to us because
we use it all the time. But just try to
pretend you're not a creature that uses language, and look
at this from the universe's perspective. What a bizarre thing

(17:43):
we're doing. We're taking electrical patterns in our brain and
then infecting other people with copies of those patterns by
making waves in the air. It's freaky. So, setting aside
any kind of naturally occurring, you know, brain wave telepathy
situation going on, we're talking about using technology, using the

(18:05):
technology that we've created and have access to, to serve
as a bridge between one mind and the next. So
you might be thinking like, well, wait a minute, how
could you do this? Let us tell you a story.
So for years now, scientists have been developing lots of
different technologies for brain to computer interfaces, or they're often

(18:25):
known as b C I S brain computer interfaces. And
in physical terms, it makes sense that you can do
this because the brain is an electrochemical machine. Things are
happening inside the brain when you're thinking thoughts, when you're
performing behaviors, whenever your brain is doing something, there's electrical
activity going on inside it that is allowing that activity,

(18:48):
that external activity, or that conscious thought to happen, and
its activities are expressed in ways for this reason, that
are detectable by machines that are sensitive to electromagnetism. You
have to get outside of this idea that your your
mind is this magical soul or that lives in a
little meat house in your skull um and just start
thinking about the meat house itself as as being the thing,

(19:10):
you know, taking a very uh uh, you know, direct
approach to what what what is going on with our mind? Yeah,
not to not to downgrade the beauty and mysteriousness of consciousness,
which is a wonderfully powerfully strange thing, but when there's
something happening in your brain, there is electricity concurrent with that,
and so if you can figure out how to measure

(19:32):
that electricity, you can somehow represent it as data that's
usable by technology. So what I've just been talking about
is neuroimaging, various forms of neuroimaging to take what's going
on in the brain and understand that with a computer,
say okay, there's some electrical spiking in this part of
the brain. Here's here's what's going on with the action

(19:53):
potentials in in this cortical region, and then stimulate that
same region in another individual's brain being. So in a sense,
it's kind of like peeking behind one puppet theater, you know,
out on the street, like a punch and judy thing, right,
seeing what what manner of physical manipulations that puppet that
puppet master is making, and then transmitting or relating those

(20:15):
exact manipulations to a puppet here within a second puppet theater.
So that's a great analogy because it encapsulates both what
you're trying to do and the limitations we have when
we try to do this. And we'll talk more about
the limitations at the end. But notice that that what
you just said would only really make sense if both

(20:36):
puppet theaters were exactly the same size and had exactly
the same puppets and the same type of puppets, and
then to the exact same method of manipulation, which is
not necessarily the case for the brain, but maybe you
can get some kind of approximation. You know, your brain
isn't the exact same as somebody else's brain. Your puppet

(20:57):
theater is different, but there are some general all rules
that operate in both puppet theaters that you can exploit.
So let's look at some of the technologies here. What
what actual technology would you use if you want to
scan somebody else's brain and see what's happening inside there. Well,
one of the most powerful methods we would have would
be implanted electrodes. You can implant directly into somebody's brain,

(21:22):
cortical microelectrode arrays which are capable of of recording what's
going on in the brain. And also what's known as
intracortical micro stimulation or i c m S, And this
means you can get both input and output with the brain,
so you can read the electrical activity to find out

(21:42):
what's going on, and if you want to stimulate parts
of the brain, you can provide little bits of electric
current through these two light up that part of the brain.
You can also use electro corticography, which is electrodes on
the exposed surface of the brain. If you want to
be really weird at out, google pictures of this. Uh.
But if you don't want to cut your skull open,

(22:03):
and I think most of us would prefer that method.
There there are still other ways you can scan what's
going on in the brain. I think typically they're not
going to be as sensitive, so there's a drawback. The
advantages you don't have to go through brain surgery. The
advantage or the disadvantages you're not gonna get quite as
much precision with the signals you're receiving. But you can
use f m r I, so that's functional magnetic resonance imaging,

(22:26):
So it's like an m r I, except you detect
real time activity in the brain by mapping blood flow
to different parts of the brain. There's magneto encephalography, which
is great. Google pictures of this also. I love telling
people to Google pictures of things. I think I do
that pretty often, but this this one is worth it
because it's a It's a system that detects magnetic field

(22:48):
fluctuations caused by electrical activity in the brain, and it
looks like you're wearing a hat the size of a car.
You're you're kind of like you get in like the
space jockey scene from Alien and then you put it
on a hat that's as big as a van with
tons of the wires and stuff. Yeah, it's gigantic and
it just goes over your head. And I guess it's
got to be very sensitive to to detect what's going

(23:10):
on with these tiny little electrical currents in your brain,
but it does it. Yeah, And all of these are
methods that I'm sure that you've heard mentioned on this
podcast before or in other science podcasts, in science literature,
these are standard means of looking at the brain and
figuring out what's going on. Yeah, and then this very
last one is gonna be crucial. And some of the
studies we're talking about it's electro and cephalography or e

(23:33):
E G. You've probably heard of this one before, but
this one is very appealing because you don't have to
get into a chair with a hat the size of
the car. You just put some electrodes on your scalp,
and the electrodes they go on the skin on your head.
They're really really sensitive to electricity enough that they can
read some of the electrical activity in your brain through

(23:54):
your scalp, though obviously, like we said, it's not nearly
as sensitive as implanted electrodes um And then of course
if you want to go so that's all the ways
we can read what's happening inside your brain. Imagine we
want to switch to input on the brain. How can
we put things directly into your brain without the use
of your senses. Well, of course, like we said, you

(24:14):
can implant electrodes, So just put some get some brain surgery,
put those stimulators in your brain and give you little shocks.
When we want you to experience something, you can use
focused ultrasound, and that's high frequency sound waves targeted at
specific parts of the brain. That's experimental. It's been used
in animals, but I think it's it's not super cool

(24:36):
to use this in humans yet. And I should throw
into like most people are familiar with with ultrasound, probably
from you know, hearing about it, you know, us sort
of witnessing participating in its use to look inside an
individual and see what's going on in there inside, particularly
to look at a at at a grilling fetus, right,
And that just underlines that that ultrasoience sound, depending on
the frequency, can be used for something as as pain

(25:00):
us and mundane is that, or it can be used
at higher frequencies, much higher frequencies to actually destroy tissue
in the body, like in cancer. So this is a
more middle ground where we can use it to stimulate
but not harm. Little middle ground that's comfortable middle ground
when you're talking about your brain. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna

(25:20):
stimulate the tissue. We're not just gonna look at it,
but we're also not going to just not enough to
melt it, we promise. And then of course the last
one we're going to mention is another one that's going
to be important in the studies we talk about, which
is transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS. And this is where
you put a nice friendly electro magnet against your skull,

(25:41):
carefully aligned over the scalp to target a particular part
of the brain, and it pulses with electromagnetism to stimulate
electrical activity in the targeted region in your brain. And
this is of course the domain of the god helmet
and uh, you know, countless studies out there anytime we're
looking at at you know, what's physically going on into
brain versus what the experience of reality is. You often

(26:03):
see this technology employed. Yeah, and so for more than
a decade now, we've seen experiments using methods like this
to send messages to and from to and from brains,
between brains and computers. These are brain computer interfaces or
b C guys. So you can get people to, say,
control a robot arm with their minds, or control a

(26:24):
computer cursor with their minds. This is now pretty much
conquered ground and science. We're still getting better at doing
it and better at doing it with less invasive procedures,
but it's a thing we can comfortably do in science
and technology. Monkey moves a robot with its brain. Yeah,

(26:46):
but what if instead of communicating with a robot arm
or with a computer, you just substituted another brain. Mm hmm.
That's where it gets kind of difficult to comprehend. Uh. So,
stuff is going from inside your brain through a computer
to another brain and then back the other way. That

(27:10):
sounds like you have suddenly discovered a technological basis for
telepathy sharing the contents of our brains, or at least
some form of brain activity, without talking, without text, without
any external communication of any kind. It's brain to brain communication.
All right, Well, let's let's launch into the studies. We'll
get more into discussion of what this would be like,

(27:33):
what the experience of molving your mind via technology would
consist of. First Let's yeah, let's just launch into some
of the studies, most of them pretty recent studies dealing
with technological telepathy. How about some rat to rat brain communication.
That's what I'm talking about, rat telepathy. It's my favorite.
How many are there any good novels about rat telepathy?

(27:54):
They've got to be is that in secretive nim who
you know? There there are some rats in dungeons and
dragons where and I love these guys because they're called
off hand. But each individual rat has a rat intelligence, right,
but they have a certain amount of of psychic ability.
So you get two rats together close together, and their
minds melt and they have the intellect of like a

(28:15):
double deck or rat brain. But you know, rats, eventually
they form large groups. Two's company three is Willard, right,
So you end up with a huge swarm of rats.
But they their brain powers all pooled together into a
powerful intellect that's capable of launching uh, you know, psychic
attacks attack patterns. Yeah. Well, and also just like the

(28:36):
mental energy, like we have so much mental power, they
actually have paranormal abilities. Well maybe the people who created
those for the Dungeons and Dragons manual went ahead and
a time machine to read about this study that was
published in Nature called a brain to brain interface for
real time sharing of sensory motor information. So I'm not

(28:56):
going to get too much into the details in the
study because it was very long. In the multiple experiments
described in the study with lots of different aspects to
them that we're all individually interesting but kind of technical,
So I'll give you the broad overview. There's several different experiments,
and the basic idea is that you've got two rats,
an encoder rat and a decoder rat. So you take

(29:18):
both your rats and you train them on a task.
For example, an led light comes on over one of
two levers, either a left lever or right lever, and
then you pick that lever, You pick the correct lever,
and you get a reward. Now, once the rats have
been trained on the basic task enough to to be
good at it, you split them up into encoders and decoders.

(29:40):
These rats get electrodes implanted in their brains with wires
running out of their heads, so this probably is not
an experiment you want to try on your friends at home.
But the encode rat has a micro electrode array that
can read its neuronal activity, so essentially it's measuring the
electrical patterns between cells in the AND like we're talking

(30:00):
about earlier. And the decode rat also has electrodes and
implanted in its brain for intracortical micro stimulation or i
c MS like we mentioned earlier, So the encoder rat
gets the same familiar stimulus. For example, the the l
E ed over the left lever lights up, and then

(30:20):
it goes to press the correct lever to get its reward.
It presses the left lever, but then the decoder rat
gets its turn and it doesn't get a clear visual signal.
Instead of the LED just popping up over the left lever,
the LED lights come on over both levers instead. What
happens is that the micro electrode array measures the first

(30:41):
rats brain activity, then it runs that data through some
analysis and amplification and sends the output straight down the
wire into the I i c m S equipment in
the decoder rats brain. Then the decoder rats brain lights
up in patterns correlated with the behavior of the encoder rats,
so that the decoder rat goes to choose a lever

(31:04):
and the translation was on a perfect It didn't get
it right every time, but it did a good bit
better than chance. So, through implanning electrodes in the brain,
one rat teaches another rat which button to push from
a separate room. This is rat to rat education with
no external communication required. It's rat brain to rat brain

(31:27):
teaching you how to get a reward, all right, and
you only have to throw out the stimulus once. You
only have to flip the switch once. It's like it's
like each rat is a string of Christmas lights and
you've just connected them together. Yeah, and so note that
this study was complex. It involved a bunch of other
interesting stuff as well, like UH commentary on the rats
as a cooperative di AD computing team, and then UH

(31:48):
stuff about feedback from one rat to the other, like
the encoder rat also getting positive feedback a reward for
when the decoder rat did things right. But anyway, so
this is is the creation of a rat to rat
brain to brain interface, which they called a bt b I,
and this is a pretty cool study. One of the

(32:10):
things I found very interesting is they said, quote, it
remains to be explained how the brain simultaneously integrates information
generated by direct I c MS and by natural stimuli,
for example, real whisker stimulation. And that's referring to a
second test they did where the rats were supposed to
judge real versus virtual width of an opening by by

(32:33):
touch on the whiskers. Okay, because they're essentially incorporating both
natural stimuli and this new you know, unnatural stimuli, you
will into into their single experience. Right, So how does
the rat like what's imagine you are the rat, and
how does the rat differentiate between between stimulation coming in

(32:57):
through the brain that's just like the brain being electrically
stimulated and the real sensory information it's getting from its
eyes and its whiskers. Can it tell the difference? How
how does that information get put together? We don't really
know because we have not done such experiments on humans
for obvious reasons, So we don't know what the experience

(33:19):
is like for the rat. But it's at least powerful
enough that the rat can perform tasks based on this
incoming brain information. But you know rat to rat is
one thing. Yeah, I think we need to do some
cross species telepathy. Yeah, we want to get a little
Willard E here and talk about human to rat mind control.

(33:40):
And this study tattled non invasive brain to brain interface
establishing functional links between two brains is from April and Uh.
In this particular study, a US South Korean team investigated, uh,
that classic question how might a human wag a rat's
tale using only their brain and brain to brain interface

(34:03):
system that shockingly requires no surgical implantation. So in this
particular experience of how it went down, First, the human
controller is hooked up to to that e G. Based
brain computer interface. Again we're talking electro in cephalography. Um,
it's in this the monitoring system. Generally it's based on

(34:24):
scout based electrodes to record electrical activity of the brain.
Then they hooked the rat up to a focused ultrasound
based computer to brain interface and uh, these again have
high frequency sound waves uh that are that are going
into the tissue. Uh, not enough to do any damage. Next,
they hit the human with some visual stimulation to invoke

(34:45):
a little uh steady state visually evoked potential. So we're
talking strobe light flashes here. The researchers were then able
to identify the same burst frequency in the humans brain. Okay,
then the humans b c I detects this and then
transfers that that same pattern to the focused ultrasound based
cb I on the rat, targeting the region of the

(35:07):
rat's brain that controls its tail, and this causes the
tail to move with the same frequency that's flashing through
the humans mind, the same frequency this flashing on the
strobe lights. Creepy, yeah, and the rat. Yeah. These six
different humans and six different rats in this experiment with
success rate. So, I mean, there's a lot of these experiences.

(35:31):
They may not seem all that amazing when you break
it down into these simple parts, but you really have
to look at what's being done, and most importantly, what's
being done completely non evasively. If it seems simple, that's
because the experiment breaks down thought and action into simple components,
which is always kind of both overwhelming and underwhelming at
the same time. When you when you see something that

(35:53):
we think of as magical, like thought, broken down into
the physical actions that constitute it, it just kind of
seems like really that's all there is, all right, So
what's next on the plate. Then we've gone we've gone
rat to rat, we've gone human to rat. What's next, Oh,
we gotta go human to human? Okay, okay? So here
was another study came out in ten called conscious Brain

(36:15):
to brain Communication and Humans using Noninvasive Technologies, published in
Plos one. And here are the basics. You've got a
cinder in India and recipients in France. So here we're
we're the cinder wears an e G cap like we're
saying stuff on the scalp to text electrical activity in
the brain, and the recipients sit under a different thing

(36:36):
than we've seen before, one of those transcranial magnetic stimulation
coils or TMS coils. And uh and like I said earlier,
what this does is it generates an electromagnetic field, so
it stimulates the brain with electrical activity at the sender's end.
There are some code words, so the sender with the
e G cap gets code words chow and o lah

(36:59):
a couple of different kind of European hellos and had
to translate them into binary code. So that's ones and
zeros are on and off switches, and then the sender
had to think about different actions to represent each one
and zero in the string to spell the word. So
for example, thinking about moving your hands could be a

(37:21):
one and thinking about moving your feet could be a zero,
and then they thought out the binary string. So if
to spell a law, it would be like, you know,
zero one, zero, you have to think about feet and
then think about moving your hands, and then think about
moving your feet, but on and on as you would
have to do to spell the whole word. So the

(37:43):
e G measured those different electrical patterns, sent them to
the computer, and then that was sent five thousand miles
over the Internet to the recipients t MS coils. The
TMS coils caused the recipients to experience this is great
phosphenes or vision of lights. So you're sitting under this coil,
you're sitting in the chair, and suddenly you might see

(38:05):
dots or lines sort of visual light hallucination patterns pop
up in your vision. And it's caused by when the
pulses of electromagnetism come through the t M S coil,
and so different kinds of visions translated into ones and zeros,
of code, and once you got your string of ones
and zeros from the t MS code, you could translate

(38:27):
that back into text from the binary code. And thus
brain to brain communication of coded messages in language was
achieved over five thousand miles. You see some of the
media reports, it sounds like they're kind of gushing over
the fact that it was five thousand miles, like the
distance matters a lot when it comes down to the
use of the Internet, you know, yeah, exactly. To me,

(38:49):
maybe there's something I didn't understand, but to me that
the distance didn't really seem to matter. I mean, once
you've got a decoded brain signal on the Internet sent
to somebody else and then reek aded back into the
message it was supposed to be, it's the Internet, And
why does it matter if it's one mile or a
hundred miles or a thousand miles. Yeah exactly. But anyway
that that that's some human to human text communication. But

(39:12):
then there's another one, and this one got some interesting
media attention. I actually wrote about this last year for
a forward Thinking video, but it was also published in
Plos one, and it was called a direct brain to
brain interface and humans. And this involves a video game.
So it's it's cooperative gaming. No, it didn't sound like

(39:32):
a very good video I'm looking at the image right now.
It's one of these video games. Yeah, it sounded like
I think it was one of those free video games. No,
it may have been designed purposefully for this study. I
don't know. It looks it looks kind of boring. Yes, So,
researchers at the University of Washington published this study showing

(39:54):
they were they were able to establish a non invasive
brain to brain interface between pete which allowed them to
cause movements in a different person's body without speech across
the internet to play the game. So it works this way.

(40:15):
One person sits in a room with the ability to
look at a screen. The screen has the game on it,
and what you see on the game is that there's
a pirate ship launching rockets at a city, and you've
got control of a cannon that can shoot down the
rockets if you time the cannon shot right. So you've
got to wait until the pirate ship shoots a rocket,

(40:36):
and then when it does, you shoot your cannon to
shoot the rocket and knock it out of the sky.
Pretty simple, right, But the problem is you can't press
a button. The only person who has a controller to
control the game is in a different room across the campus,
different buildings, like exactly right. So you are sitting there

(41:00):
watching the screen of the game with an e G
cap on your head. And when you see that it's
time to press that button to shoot down the rocket,
you think, move my hand. You don't move your hand,
You just think move my hand. The e G cap
records that and says, oh, okay, it's time. Since that
information across the internet to the room which has the

(41:24):
other person sitting in it. Now, this person cannot see
the screen that the game is being played on, but
this person has the ability to press the button to
fire the rocket. And when the when the timing is right,
when the signal arrives, it activates a t MS coil
that causes their hand to jerk. And when that causes

(41:45):
their hand to jerk, they press a button that says
fire the rocket. That signal goes back to the game
and fires the rocket. So you have to so neither
one can play the game alone. They have to cooperate
to play the game, and they can't talk about it.
It's just thought to thought to action, all right. I
think that makes that makes sense. I think everybody's falling

(42:08):
along with that. So so what was the success rate? Like,
how did that? How did these uh weirdly conjoined individuals
um perform in this simple game? So there were three
pairs of subjects and they correctly identified and destroyed eighty
three point three percent, twenty five percent, and thirty seven
point five percent of the rockets, respectively during the the

(42:28):
experimental games, and then they had a zero percent success
rate during control games. So they did better in the
experimental games where real information was being transmitted than in
the control games when it wasn't. So there are several
takeaways from this. One of the things that I think
is interesting about this is that the receiver's action is
not conscious. They're not thinking, they're not getting a message

(42:51):
that they're decoding. They're just being caused to jerk, all right.
So they're not hearing a voice in their head that's
saying saying, shoot it now, push the button, now, push
the button now. It's just happening. No, they're they're getting
some magnetism that says, uh, Suddenly their hand moves and
they press a button. Uh. There are three takeaways that
the authors of the study came up with. So they said,

(43:12):
one of the takeaways from the study is that we've
got the technology now that's sufficient to develop devices for
rudimentary brain to brain communication. So that's one of the
things they say. They've demonstrated it's already here. We can
do it now, though it is rudimentary. The second thing

(43:35):
they point out is that working brain to brain interfaces
can be built out of non invasive technologies. Neither person
here required a brain implant. Uh, they it was e g.
To the transcranial magnetic stimulation. And then the third thing
they point out is that this is very rudimentary, but
the fact that it can be done at all means

(43:57):
we need to start having a conversation between atist neuroscientists
and regulatory agencies on the ethical, moral, and societal implications
of b b I. S Uh. They're they're talking. They're
about the ones that could grow in the future out
of the rudimentary technologies that are being developed now. Yeah. Yeah,
setting the stage for the whole world of neural security, right,

(44:20):
neuro security protecting our our our thoughts and emotions and
true feelings from all those technologically enhanced scanners out there. Yeah.
Now there's an even more recent study on this, right,
there was one that came out just in September of
this year in September, where it was not exactly the
same group, but most of the same scientists, uh, some

(44:42):
of the same authors from that that previous one published
again in p o OS one a study called Playing
twenty Questions with the Mind Collaborative problem solving by humans
using a brain to brain interface. And it was a
set up a lot like the last one. It was
pretty much just the same with cinder with the g
and a receiver using a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil. But

(45:04):
instead what they did here, instead of playing a video
game together, they got them to trade coded messages in
order to play a game of twenty questions without talking. Okay,
so this is communication that goes beyond merely just push
that button, push that button, right, and but it's still
one of the things worth pointing out is that it
is still coded communication. Now that they had a pretty

(45:26):
high success rate, the setup is a is a whole
lot like the last experiment. You've got to you've got
a cinder wearing an e G cap to read their brain,
and you've got a receiver under a t MS coil
to uh to give them information. Except what's different here
is that instead of the t MS coil giving somebody
a jerk hand movement in the hand, it gives them

(45:47):
what we were talking about earlier, a phosphene of vision,
and they can use that to decode information sent by
the person in the e G cap. And by trading
information back and forth this way, by being able to
answer yes or no questions by sending them a phosphene
or not, these people can ask and answer questions to

(46:09):
play a game of twenty questions to guess an object
without any words or language. So the basic ideas say
you have a parakeet in mind, the person asks a
question that they select from a square from a screen,
like can this thing fly? And then the person in
the e G cap gives a stimulus by looking at
two different lights to answer yes or no, And then

(46:31):
that goes back to the person who answered the question
and they get They get a sense of whether the
answer is yes or no by whether or not they
get this vision of light from the from the coil,
and by going back and forth this way they can
solve the puzzle and eventually figure out what the object is.
And this set up allowed the people in the experimental
group to win seventy two percent of the games. And

(46:52):
so there's a control group where no genuine information was
being traded back and forth, and only eight percent of
those participants were all to correctly identify the object. So
pretty cool. This is twenty questions without words. Well, actually
know there were words because you had to select the
questions to go back and forth, but the answers didn't

(47:13):
require words. It was just coded brain signals, the flashes
of light in the mind. Yeah, okay, So the authors
themselves point out a couple of limitations at the end.
One of them is that the kind of obvious thing
is that this doesn't necessarily provide any better communication than talking, right,
It's it's it feels very hamstrong that you're having to

(47:35):
to to rely on this convoluted method of flashes, where
when really we have far better means of communication and artists,
it would be much easier to play the game by
by text messages or just by talking. But they point
out how well, even something like this could probably help
in somebody who has UH, for example, the inability to

(47:56):
move or speak if it broke as aphasia or something
like that, um or if it's being played between people
who don't speak the same language. So so that that's
possibly a good point. But then they also point out
that this is just sort of a proof of concept
for technologies that could become much more power and powerful
and sensitive in the future, and that's the real question. Yeah.

(48:19):
And then the other thing they point out is a
limitation of their own study, is that it doesn't allow
bi directional transfer of information. The information is going from
one person to the other, but it would be very
interesting to hook up both the sender and the recipient,
or both people at least with both capabilities. So you've
got an e G and a t MS coil and

(48:40):
you can send information back and forth both ways, which
is when things would really start getting creepy. All right,
So there's a taste of where we are with the type,
with the with the research and the technology where and
in an idea of where we may be going. So
how do we prepare for and what's it gonna be
like as these more advanced telepathic technologies become available and

(49:02):
even become a part of our life. Well, I think
it's interesting because it's a question whether these have really
changed that concern we brought up at the beginning of
the episode about linguistic versus non linguistic telepathy. Um, if
it's just saying that you will be able to send
coded messages like like this kind of binary morse code

(49:25):
type thing we were talking about earlier between brains, that's
one thing. If it were to somehow become the case
that you could send something more complex and difficult to quantify,
like a non encoded thought or memory or something like that,
that would be very interesting. But I don't know if
that's even possible, because, like we talked about with our

(49:47):
puppet theater analogy, your puppet theater is not exactly the
same as somebody else's puppet theater. They can't just put
electrodes in your brain and say, well, I'm going to
share this, uh, this image by lighting up exactly the
same neurons in your brain that are lit up in
somebody else's brain. You don't have the same neurons as them.

(50:08):
Everybody's brain is going to be a little bit different.
So I'm not sure how that would even work without
some kind of encoding back and forth. And this is
something that's been pointed out in some of the criticism
of these studies and the supposed implications of it, Again,
they are just sending coded messages, right, It's still basically language.
It's not emotions. Ideas thoughts though the one about making

(50:31):
the hand jerk or making the tail wag is kind
of interesting because that's motor control. But for the most
part of these situations where you could still lie, it's
not like it's so this direct, you know, unfiltered communication system. Yeah,
but what would that be like that? That's the thing
I keep coming back to, what would what would it
be like to have this communal mind experience with someone else?

(50:51):
And in researching this, I came across a really cool
u A in magazine article by Peter Watt's titled Hive Consciousness.
And in this he points out that the brain that
makes us who we are, you know, essentially, it quotes,
spreads across two cerebritl hemispheres connected by the corpus colossum,
a fat, meaty pipe more than two hundred million accents thick. Yeah,

(51:16):
this sort of the idea that you've already got two
brains in a way, and in fact, he points out
that if you were to cleave these hemispheres in two
and that's indeed a last ditch surgery that sometimes a
uh SEE employee to deal with to deal with certain
forms of epilepsy, each half would go its own way,
developing its own taste and beliefs. And to support this,

(51:37):
he points to uh a talk that was given by
noted neuroscientist Villano Ramaschandren at the two thousand six Beyond
Belief Conference, and you can find video of this on YouTube.
I'll try and link to the clip on the landing
page for this episode of Stuff to Boil Your Mind
dot com. But Ramachandren points the he shares an account
of a split brain patient with a Christian hemisphere and

(52:00):
an atheist one UH and they have to end up
having to teach the hemispheres to communicate with each other.
So the the general idea here, I think was that
he's saying that the corpus colosum helps uh homogenize the
two different brains. It creates the conscious illusion that your
hemispheres are in accord with one another. But if you're

(52:22):
able to sever them and you don't have this high
bandwidth connection between them, they're very much two different minds. Yeah,
and it's not a gradual separation either. It's not like
a musical duo breaking up and then each struggles for
years to find their own solo identity. You know, this
side of the brain eventually becomes atheists, and this side
eventually becomes a believer. No, scientists can actually induce hemispheric

(52:43):
isolation chemically in the brain, just shutting it down uh
and uh and then watching just without any delay that
the undrugged hemisphere sort of coming into its own, becoming
the primary decider, developing a whole new personality right there
in front of so, Like I I a neesthetize your

(53:03):
left brain and I suddenly see your right brain evil
twin emerges the dominant personality, which was really only half
of you before. Yeah, it reminds me of a character
in the Culture book by Enim Banks consider Flibus. There's
a character name uh Craiklin who has enhanced hemispheric task
division in his brain, but basically he sleeps with one

(53:25):
eye open. He can use a uni hemispheric sleep much
like a you know, like many animals out there that
never completely put their brain under uh. So, one third
of the time, one half of his brain sleeps and
he's a bit dreamy and vague. Another third of the
time he's all logic in numbers and doesn't communicate all
that well. And only one third of the time is
he fully awake with both sides of his brain making

(53:48):
up who he is. That's pretty cool, yeah, and uh yeah,
So it's it's interesting to think of it in terms
of Ramachandren's example. He he jokingly pointed out, what happens
if this individual dies? Does half his brain go to
heaven and one half go to hell? And uh? And
it makes us ask some difficult questions about consciousness itself,
because consciousness remains something of a mystery and when we

(54:09):
have a hell of a time unraveling and as author
our Scott Backer points that, we're trying to explain the
magic of a coin trick, right, but we're in a
horrible position because we are the magic that we're trying
to understand. We're trying to explain consciousness. You mean, yeah,
with consciousness and then but ultimately with any any time
time we try and tackle our you know, our our

(54:30):
cognition and our and our brain activity, and certainly we
try to translate it into another being or try to
bring two of them together. We have to we have
to unravel the magic of the human experience. Yeah, well,
we mentioned this earlier. I mean, when you start under
understanding consciousness for some reason, that's kind of a scary thing.

(54:51):
Like we we like this magical illusion of the unified
self to to persist. And when you start separating consciousness
in to constituent parts or understanding I mean we I'm
not saying we fully understand consciousness, but even understanding little
bits that might inform how it comes together, it's a
little alarming. You don't like the idea that your consciousness

(55:13):
can be explained via, you know, a combination of different
processes in the brain. But one of the scary things
here is is the implication, going back to brain to
brain interfaces, that what if combining different brains with technology
in different skulls will become just as seamless as combining

(55:34):
the two hemispheres of your brain via the corpus colossum. Uh.
And it's such that maybe our producer Null and our
other co host, Christian would link their brains up via
computer and it wouldn't feel like they were two different
brains connected. It would just feel like they were one brain. Yeah,

(55:55):
like essentially would be like you know, like a Vultron
scenario or or or like an assemblage of of keywords.
So like, oh, we we need somebody who's really good
at maritime law, but we also need somebody who really
it's really tuned into pop culture and we need to
go out and speak. Well, what can we do? Well,
let's just take these two individuals, hook them up together
and make them manifest a new individual who is a

(56:19):
perfect uh you know, convergence of those two uh skill sets. Yeah. Now,
now again, I want to say, who knows if such
a thing as possible? We don't want to get to
uh to hype heavy here and suggest that we we've
now demonstrated that it's possible to link brains up in
a way that they seamlessly combined. But just the mere
possibility of that is a very like human experience changing proposition. Yeah,

(56:45):
and and what are the legal ramifications? So if if me,
if you and I, if we conjoined our brains with
some fancy helmets and essentially became this different mind state,
and in that mind state broke a law or invented something,
you know, who owns that invention? Who's responsible for that crime.
And then it gets even weirder if you look at

(57:06):
our own brains and think of it as two halves
of brains that are connected together. It's like which individual
has the right to exist and even his personhood that
the Joe Robert being Joe Robert or the two halves
of Joe in your head and the two halves of
Robert in mind. I mean, do you think it's possible
for one hemisphere of your brain to conspire to kill

(57:27):
the other one? Yeah, or sue it, or or get
out of some sort of a neural divorce. We will
be all right, brain from now on. Uh yeah. Well, anyway,
if we've got you worried about this based on this
final discussion, it is a good thing to consider in
the long run. But please do remember that these these

(57:47):
experiments we've been talking about in this episode don't indicate
anything like that yet. Like we we certainly don't want
to get into the overhype machine that the types of communication,
not the overhype machine, but maybe the over dream machine.
You like, take these and run wild with the possibilities,
But don't you know, this is still super super rudimentary communication.

(58:08):
Like we said, it's it's very coded, It requires extremely
bulky and difficult and expensive equipment, and it's it's it's
impressive in one sense that it can be done at all,
But what can be done with it is not that
impressive yet. Indeed, who knows how impressive it will be
or is impressive the right word? Who knows how daunting

(58:30):
and uh and mind bending it will be? Yeah? Game changing? Alright. Well,
there you have it, a little exploration into technological telepathy
and some of the possible near future and far future ramifications.
Before we head out here, I just want to remind everyone, Hey,
don't over to stuff to Blow your mind dot com.
If you want to check out all the podcast episodes,

(58:52):
all the videos, blog postlinks out to our social media accounts,
it's all there. And in the meantime, how can they
get in touch with us? How can how can they
communicate the contents of their brain to our brains the
magic of the internet. Well you can use some good
old Stone age linguistic technology and type out an email

(59:12):
and send it to us that blow the mind at
House of Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot Com.

(59:36):
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