‘Vulcan mind meld’ a first for humans

Scientists said they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made towards brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more studies, can affect another brain.

Most research has been aimed at helping paralysed patients regain movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Centre's Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a laboratory in Brazil and sent via internet to the brain of a rat in the US. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behaviour. And electrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was recently sent via the internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not this study, received funding from the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

For the new study, funded by the US Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies, University of Washington professor Rajesh Rao, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his laboratory on August 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain.