One of the core elements of World of Depleted’s D1 universe is how much it’s based on current technology set just a little farther into the future. One of the contested areas of this is in the form of the Coppertops, a group of specialized warriors and assassins with microchips embedded in their brains. These chips are specifically targeted for certain abilities, including operating micro-keyed weapons or vehicles, computer hacking, and, for some of the Severed Reaper clans, brain-to-brain communication. (The most recent example of this is being explored in the new “Croc Grahama, PI” series I’m personally writing, that deals with a protagonist who can communicate with another person via this method.)
While prior development had shown that brains can control outside computers, there had been little proof that we could actually create a chip that could cause one brain to be able to communicate with another. Well, in this month’s Nature, they have proven that this is not only possible, but already attainable. In a test at North Carolina’s Duke University, in which rats’ brains were wired to one another, it was found that one rat could effectively pass their “thoughts” on to the other rat as much as 70% of the time. (The test involved one rat seeing visual stimuli and making a choice based on that stimuli, and the second rat making choices based only on the mental input without any visual stimuli.)
But it’s not just in situations where one rat can be physically wired to another. They’ve developed a way to do it long distance. As the BBC reports:
‘One replication of the experiment successfully linked a rat at Duke with one at the University of Natal in Brazil. [Professor Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina] foresees eventually extending the system to larger numbers of animals. “We are already building the setup… You could actually have millions of brains tackling the same problem and sharing a solution.”‘
As you can imagine, the concept is a staggering one, with many implications, which is why it’s one we’ve explored here at World of Depleted!
To read the full article reported at Nature go to: A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information
