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Some posts on Mind-controlled prosthetics.

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Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

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Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

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Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

In this interview, Discover magazine's Carl Zimmer gives an overview of neuroscience today, including the top challenges in the field, the role of the fMRI machine in exploring the brain, breakthroughs in neuroscience in the next five years and the history of neuroscience.

Credit: National Science Foundation and Discover magazine

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Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain- All Images | NSF - National Science Foundation

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Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain In this interview, Discover magazine's Carl Zimmer gives an overview of neuroscience today, including the top challenges in the field, the role of the fMRI machine in exploring the brain, breakthroughs in neuroscience in the next five years and the history of neuroscience.

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You carry around a three-pound mass of wrinkly material in your head that controls every single thing you will ever do. From enabling you to think, learn, create, and feel emotions to controlling every blink, breath, and heartbeat-this fantastic control center is your brain. It is a structure so amazing that a famous scientist once called it "the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe."

Your brain is faster and more powerful than a supercomputer.

Your kitten is on the kitchen counter. She's about to step onto a hot stove. You have only seconds to act. Accessing the signals coming from your eyes, your brain quickly calculates when, where, and at what speed you will need to dive to intercept her. Then it orders your muscles to do so. Your timing is perfect and she's safe. No computer can come close to your brain's awesome ability to download, process, and react to the flood of information coming from your eyes, ears, and other sensory organs.

Your brain generates enough electricity to power a lightbulb.

Your brain contains about 100 billion microscopic cells called neurons-so many it would take you over 3,000 years to count them all. Whenever you dream, laugh, think, see, or move, it's because tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron highways. Believe it or not, the activity in your brain never stops. Countless messages zip around inside it every second like a supercharged pinball machine. Your neurons create and send more messages than all the phones in the entire world. And while a single neuron generates only a tiny amount of electricity, all your neurons together can generate enough electricity to power a low-wattage bulb.

Neurons send info to your brain at more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) per hour.

A bee lands on your bare foot. Sensory neurons in your skin relay this information to your spinal cord and brain at a speed of more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) per hour. Your brain then uses motor neurons to transmit the message back through your spinal cord to your foot to shake the bee off quickly. Motor neurons can relay this information at more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) per hour.

When you learn, you change the structure of your brain.

Riding a bike seems impossible at first. But soon you master it. How? As you practice, your brain sends "bike riding" messages along certain pathways of neurons over and over, forming new connections. In fact, the structure of your brain changes every time you learn, as well as whenever you have a new thought or memory.

Exercise helps make you smarter.

It is well known that any exercise that makes your heart beat faster, like running or playing basketball, is great for your body and can even help improve your mood. But scientists have recently learned that for a period of time after you've exercised, your body produces a chemical that makes your brain more receptive to learning. So if you're stuck on a homework problem, go out and play a game of soccer, then try the problem again. You just might discover that you're able to solve it.

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(Image credit: Vintage MedStock/Getty Images)

The human brain is the command center for the human nervous system. It receives signals from the body's sensory organs and outputs information to the . The human brain has the same basic structure as other mammal brains but is larger in relation to body size than the brains of many other mammals, such as dolphins, whales and elephants.

How much does a human brain weigh?

The human brain weighs about 3 lbs. (1.4 kilograms) and makes up about 2% of a human's body weight. On average, male brains are about 10% larger than female brains, according to Northwestern Medicine in Illinois. The average male has a brain volume of nearly 78 cubic inches (1,274 cubic centimeters), while the average female brain has a volume of 69 cubic inches (1,131 cubic cm). The cerebrum, which is the main part of the brain located in the front area of the skull, makes up 85% of the brain's weight.

How many brain cells does a human have?

The human brain contains about 86 billion nerve cells (neurons) - called " gray matter," according to a 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The brain also has about the same number of non-neuronal cells, such as the oligodendrocytes that insulate neuronal axons with a myelin sheath. This gives axons (thin strands through which electrical impulses are transmitted between neurons) a white appearance, and so these axons are called the brain's "white matter."

Other cool facts about the brain

The brain can't multitask, according to the Dent Neurologic Institute. Instead, it switches between tasks, which increases errors and makes things take longer.

The human brain triples in size during the first year of life and reaches full maturity at about age 25.

Humans use all of the brain all of the time, not just 10% of it.

The brain is 60% fat, according to Northwestern Medicine.

The human brain can generate 23 watts of electrical power - enough to fuel a small lightbulb.

Anatomy of the human brain

The largest part of the human brain is the cerebrum, which is divided into two hemispheres, according to the Mayfield Clinic. Each hemisphere consists of four lobes: the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital. The rippled surface of the cerebrum is called the cortex. Underneath the cerebrum lies the brainstem, and behind that sits the cerebellum.

The frontal lobe is important for cognitive functions, such as thought and planning ahead, and for the control of voluntary movement. The temporal lobe generates memories and emotions. The parietal lobe integrates input from different senses and is important for spatial orientation and navigation. Visual processing takes place in the occipital lobe, near the back of the skull.

The brainstem connects to the spinal cord and consists of the medulla oblongata, pons and midbrain. The primary functions of the brainstem include relaying information between the brain and the body; supplying most of the cranial nerves to the face and head; and performing critical functions in controlling the heart, breathing and levels of consciousness (it's involved in controlling wake and sleep cycles).

(Image credit: Mark Garlick/Getty Images)

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Between the cerebrum and brainstem lie the thalamus and hypothalamus. The thalamus relays sensory and motor signals to the cortex. Except for olfaction (sense of smell), every sensory system sends information through the thalamus to the cortex, according to the online textbook, " Neuroanatomy, Thalamus" (StatPublishing, 2020). The hypothalamus connects the nervous system to the endocrine system - where hormones are produced - via the pituitary gland.

The cerebellum lies beneath the cerebrum and has important functions in motor control. It plays a role in coordination and balance and may also have some cognitive functions.

The brain also has four interconnected cavities, called ventricles, which produce what's called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This fluid circulates around the brain and spinal cord, cushioning it from injury, and is eventually absorbed into the bloodstream.

In addition to cushioning the central nervous system, CSF clears waste from the brain. In what's called the glymphatic system, waste products from the interstitial fluid surrounding brain cells move into the CSF and away from the brain, according to the Society for Neuroscience. Studies suggest this waste clearance process mostly happens during sleep. In a 2013 Science paper, researchers reported that when mice were asleep, their interstitial spaces expanded by 60%, and the brain's glymphatic system cleared beta-amyloid (the protein that makes up Alzheimer's disease's hallmark plaques) faster than when the rodents were awake. Clearing potentially neurotoxic waste from the brain or "taking out the trash" through the glymphatic system could be one reason that sleep is so important, the authors suggested in their paper.

Is brain size linked to intelligence?

Overall brain size doesn't correlate with level of intelligence for non-human animals. For instance, the brain of a sperm whale is more than five times heavier than the human brain, but humans are considered to be of higher intelligence than sperm whales. A more accurate measure of an animal's likely intelligence is the ratio between the size of the brain and body size, although not even that measure puts humans in first place: The tree shrew has the highest brain-to-body ratio of any mammal, according to BrainFacts.org, a website produced by the Society for Neuroscience.

Among humans, brain size doesn't indicate a person's level of intelligence. Some geniuses in their field have smaller-than-average brains, while others have brains that are larger than average, according to Christof Koch, a neuroscientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. For example, compare the brains of two highly acclaimed writers. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev's brain was found to weigh 71 ounces (2,021 grams), while the brain of French writer Anatole France weighed only 36 ounces (1,017 g).

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

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The reason behind humans' intelligence, in part, is neurons and folds. Humans have more neurons per unit volume than other animals, and the only way they can all fit within the brain's layered structure is to make folds in the outer layer, or cortex, said Dr. Eric Holland, a neurosurgeon and cancer biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington.

"The more complicated a brain gets, the more gyri and sulci, or wiggly hills and valleys, it has," Holland told Live Science. Other intelligent animals, such as monkeys and dolphins, also have these folds in their cortex, whereas mice have smooth brains, he said.

How the brain is integrated also seems to matter when it comes to intelligence. A genius among geniuses, Albert Einstein had an average size brain; researchers suspect his mind-boggling cognitive abilities may have stemmed from its high connectivity, with several pathways connecting distant regions of his brain, Live Science previously reported.

Humans also have the largest frontal lobes of any animal, Holland said. The frontal lobes are associated with higher-level functions such as self-control, planning, logic and abstract thought - basically, "the things that make us particularly human," he said.

What's the difference between the left brain and right brain?

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right, connected by a bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. The hemispheres are strongly, though not entirely, symmetrical. Generally, the left brain controls the muscles on the right side of the body, and the right brain controls the left side. One hemisphere may be slightly dominant, as with left- or right-handedness.
Related: What's the difference between the right brain and the left brain?
The popular notions about "left brain" and "right brain" qualities are generalizations that are not well supported by evidence. However, there are some important differences between these areas. The left brain contains regions that are involved in language production and comprehension (called Broca's area and Wernicke's area, respectively) and is also associated with mathematical calculation and fact retrieval, Holland said. The right brain plays a role in visual and auditory processing, spatial skills and artistic ability - more instinctive or creative things, Holland said - though these functions involve both hemispheres. "Everyone uses both halves all the time," he said.

(Image credit: Dimitri Otis/Getty Images)

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BRAIN Initiative

In April 2013, President Barack Obama announced a scientific grand challenge known as the BRAIN Initiative, short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. The $100-million-plus effort aimed to develop new technologies to produce a dynamic picture of the human brain, from the level of individual cells to complex circuits.

Like other major science efforts, such as the Human Genome Project, the significant expense is usually worth the investment, Holland said. Scientists hope the increased understanding will lead to new ways to treat, cure and prevent brain disorders.

The project contains members from several government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as private research organizations, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In May 2013, the project's backers outlined their goals in the journal . In September 2014, the NIH announced $46 million in BRAIN Initiative grants. Industry members pledged another $30 million to support the effort, and major foundations and universities also agreed to apply more than $240 million of their own research toward BRAIN Initiative goals.

When the project was announced, President Obama convened a commission to evaluate the ethical issues involved in research on the brain. In May 2014, the commission released the first half of its report, calling for ethics to be integrated early and explicitly in neuroscience research, Live Science previously reported. In March 2015, the commission released the second half of the report, which focused on issues of cognitive enhancement, informed consent and using neuroscience in the legal system, Live Science reported.

The Brain Initiative has achieved several of its goals. As of 2018, the NIH has "invested more than $559 million in the research of more than 500 scientists," and Congress appropriated "close to $400 million in NIH funding for fiscal year 2018," according to the initiative's website. The research funding facilitated the development of new brain-imaging and brain-mapping tools, and helped create the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) - an effort to catalog the brain's "parts' list." The BICCN released its first in November 2018.

Beyond a parts list, the BRAIN Initiative is working to develop a detailed picture of the circuits in the brain. For example, in 2020, BRAIN Initiative researchers published a study in the journal , reporting that they had developed a system, tested in mice, to control and monitor circuit activity at any depth in the brain. Previous efforts could only examine circuits close to the surface of the brain. Also in 2020, the initiative's Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, an effort to map circuits in the cortex, launched a where researchers can share their data, including electron microscopy images of circuits.

Since 2019, the initiative has sponsored a photo and video contest in which initiative researchers are invited to submit eye-catching depictions of the brain. Check out the 2020 winners on the Brain Initiative website.

Does the brain stay alive after a person dies?

April 2019 marked a milestone for both the initiative and neuroscience research at large: BRAIN Initiative researcher Nenad Sestan, of the Yale School of Medicine, published a report in the journal (opens in new tab), revealing that his research team had restored circulation and some cellular functions to pig brains four hours after the animals' deaths, Live Science previously reported. The results challenged the prevailing view that brain cells are suddenly and irreversibly damaged shortly after the heart stops beating. The researchers did not observe any signs of consciousness in the brains, nor were they trying to; on the contrary, the researchers injected pig brains with chemicals that mimicked blood flow and also blocked neurons from firing. The researchers emphasized that they did not bring the pig brains back to life. They did, however, restore some of their cellular activity.
This article was updated on May 28, 2021 by Live Science contributor Ashley P. Taylor.
Additional resources

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(Image credit: Vintage MedStock/Getty Images) The human brain is the command center for the human nervous system. It receives signals from the body's sensory organs and outputs information to the . The human brain has the same basic structure as other mammal brains but is larger in relation to body size than the brains of many other mammals, such as dolphins, whales and elephants.

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Telekinesis: Moving things with your mind

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Telekinesis: Moving things with your mind

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"Who here is psychic? Raise my hand!"

That's an old joke, but there are several claimed types of psychic powers, including precognition (knowing the future) and telepathy (describing things at a remote location). But for sheer impressiveness it's hard to beat psychokinesis, the ability to move objects through mind power. The word is derived from the Greek words for "mind" and "motion" and is also called PK or telekinesis.

Fictional psychokinetics are easy to find: The popular X-Men comic and film franchise includes the character Jean Grey, whose powers include extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. The 2009 movie "Push" is about a group of young Americans with various psychic abilities who team up and use their paranormal powers against a shadowy U.S. government agency.

Though many Americans believe in psychic ability (about 15 percent of us, according to a 2005 Baylor Religion Survey), scientific evidence for its existence remains elusive. Some people even link psychokinesis to the spiritual world, suggesting for example that some reports of ghosts - such as poltergeists - are not manifestations of the undead at all, but instead the unconscious releases of a person's psychic anger or angst.

If people could move everyday objects with nothing more than their thoughts, this should be quite easy to demonstrate: Who wouldn't like their latte delivered by a psychic barista from across the counter, floating it right to your hand with a mere gesture?

This doesn't happen, of course. Instead researchers have focused on what they term "micro-PK," or the manipulation of very small objects. The idea is that if the ability exists, its force is obviously very weak. Therefore, the less physical energy that would have to be exerted on an object to physically move it, the more obvious the effect should be. For this reason, laboratory experiments often focus on rather mundane feats such as trying to make dice land on a certain number at an above-chance rate, or influencing a computerized random number generator.

Because of this change in methodologies, psychokinesis experiments rely more heavily on complex statistical analyses; the issue was not whether a person could bend a spoon or knock a glass over with their minds, for example, but whether they could make a coin come up heads significantly above 50 percent of the time over the course of 1,000 trials.

Spiritualism and mediums

The idea of people being able to move objects through mind power alone has intrigued people for centuries, though only in the late 1800s was it seen as an ability that might be scientifically demonstrated. This occurred during the heyday of the early religion Spiritualism, when psychic mediums claimed to contact the dead during séances, and objects would suddenly and mysteriously move, float, or fly by themselves across the darkened room, seemingly untouched by human hands. Though many people were convinced - including, ironically, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes - it was all a hoax. Fraudulent psychics resorted to trickery, using everything from hidden wires to black-clad accomplices to make objects appear to move untouched.

As the public slowly grew wise to the faked psychokinesis, the phenomenon faded from view. It was revived again in the 1930s and 1940s, when a researcher at Duke University named J.B. Rhine became interested in the idea that people could affect the outcome of random events using their minds. Rhine began with tests of dice rolls, asking subjects to influence the outcome through the power of their minds. Though his results were mixed and the effects were small, they were enough to convince him that there was something mysterious going on. Unfortunately for Rhine, other researchers failed to duplicate his findings, and many errors were found in his methods.

In the 1970s, Uri Geller became the world's best-known psychic and made millions traveling the world demonstrating his claimed psychokinetic abilities, including starting broken watches and bending spoons. Though he denied using magic tricks, many skeptical researchers observed that all of Geller's amazing feats could be - and have been - duplicated by magicians.

Public interest in psychokinesis returned in the 1980s. One person nationally known for claimed psychokinetic ability, James Hydrick, tried to demonstrate his powers on the television show "That's My Line" in 1981, following several successful television appearances. He claimed to move small objects, such as a pencil or the pages of a telephone book, with his mind. Host Bob Barker consulted with skeptic James Randi, who suspected that Hydrick was merely discreetly blowing on the pages to make them move.

To prevent this method of trickery Randi placed styrofoam bits around the open book, as the lightweight pieces would clearly be disturbed if the pages were moving because of Hydrick's breath instead of his mind. After many awkward minutes in front of Barker, Randi, a panel of judges, and the live studio audience, a flustered Hydrick finally said that his powers weren't cooperating. Hydrick later admitted that his psychokinetic powers had been faked, and marveled at how easy it had been to fool the public.

Frauds and fakery

The history of psychokinesisis a history of frauds and fakery, both proven and suspected.

Even many researchers admit that the data fall far short of scientific standards of proof; researcher Russell Targ, in his book "The Reality of ESP" (2012, Quest Books) acknowledges that "the evidence for laboratory psychokinesis is quite weak."

Recent advances in virtual reality technology may, however, be the next best thing. In 2017, a company called Neurable announced plans to develop psychokinesis - or at least a virtual reality form of it - for a game called Awakening. Using a combination of eye movement tracking technology and electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors in a headset, the game allows a player to move and manipulate objects in a virtual world merely by looking and thinking. After an initial calibration process that takes several minutes, the players can select and move computer-generated images.

Perhaps one day technology will allow us to actually move objects with our thoughts, but until then we must be satisfied with the power depicted in fiction and fantasy.

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Benjamin Radford - Live Science Contributor

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Psychokinesis: Facts About Mind Over Matter

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"Who here is psychic? Raise my hand!" That's an old joke, but there are several claimed types of psychic powers, including precognition (knowing the future) and telepathy (describing things at a remote location). But for sheer impressiveness it's hard to beat psychokinesis, the ability to move objects through mind power.

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Are Telepathy Experiments Stunts or Science?

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Are Telepathy Experiments Stunts or Science?

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In a paper published last week in the journal PLOS One, neuroscientists and computer engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle described a brain-to-brain interface they built that lets two people coöperatively play a simple video game. Earlier this year, a company in Barcelona called Starlab described transmitting short words like "ciao," encoded as binary digits, between the brains of individuals on different continents.

Both studies used a similar setup: the sender of the message wore an EEG (electroencephalography) cap that captured electrical signals generated by his cortex while he thought about moving his hands or feet. These signals were then sent over the Internet to a computer that translated them into jolts delivered to a recipient's brain using a magnetic coil. In Starlab's case, the recipient perceived a flash of light. In the University of Washington's case, the magnetic pulse caused an involuntary twitch of the wrist over a touchpad, to shoot a rocket in a computer game.

Neither EEG recording nor this kind of brain stimulation (called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) are new technologies. What is novel is bringing the two together for the purposes of simple communication. The Starlab researchers suggested that such "hyperinteraction technologies" could "eventually have a profound impact on the social structure of our civilization."

For now, however, the technology remains extremely limited. Neither experiment transmitted emotions, thoughts, or ideas. Instead they used human brains essentially as relays to convey a simple signal between two computers. The rate as which information was transmitted was also glacial.

Safety guidelines limit the use of TMS devices to a single pulse every 20 seconds. But even without that restriction, a person can only transmit a few bits of information per minute wearing an EEG cap, because willfully changing the shape of their brain wave takes deliberate concentration.

By comparison, human speech conveys information at roughly 3,000 bits per minute, according to one estimate. That means the information content of a 90-second conversation would take a day or more to transmit mentally.

Researchers intend to explore more precise, and faster, ways of conveying information. Andrea Stocco, one of the University of Washington researchers, says his team has a $1 million grant from the WM Keck Foundation to upgrade its equipment and to carry out experiments with different ways of exchanging information between minds, including with focused ultrasound waves that can stimulate nerves through the skull.

Stocco says an important use of the technology would be to help scientists test their ideas about how neurons in the brain represent information, especially about abstract concepts. For instance, if a researcher believed she could identify the neuronal pattern reflecting, say, the idea of a yellow airplane, one way to prove it would be to transmit that pattern to another person and ask what she was thinking.

"You can see this interface as two different things," says Stocco. "One is a super-cool toy that we have developed because it's futuristic and an engineering feat but that doesn't produce science. The other is, in the future, the ultimate way to test hypotheses about how the brain encodes information."

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Are Telepathy Experiments Stunts or Science?

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Two scientific teams this year patched together some well-known technologies to directly exchange information between human brains. The projects, in the U.S. and Europe, appear to represent the first occasions in history that any two people have transmitted information without either of them speaking or moving any muscle.

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Brain-to-brain interfaces: the science of telepathy

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Brain-to-brain interfaces: the science of telepathy

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All he needs is the right equipment and he might actually be able to transmit thoughts. Mauro Sartori/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk a mile (or 1.6 kilometres) in somebody else's shoes? Or have you ever tried to send a telepathic message to a partner in transit to "pick up milk on your way home"?

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces are turning the science fantasy of transmitting thoughts directly from one brain to another into reality.

Studies published in the last two years have reported direct transmission of brain activity between two animals, between two humans and even between a human and a rat. These "brain-to-brain interfaces" (BBIs) allow for direct transmission of brain activity in real time by coupling the brains of two individuals.

So what is the science behind this?

Reading the brainwaves

Brain-to-brain interface is made possible because of the way brain cells communicate with each other. Cell-to-cell communication occurs via a process known as synaptic transmission, where chemical signals are passed between cells resulting in electrical spikes in the receiving cell.

Synaptic transmission forms the basis of all brain activity, including motor control, memory, perception and emotion. Because cells are connected in a network, brain activity produces a synchronised pulse of electrical activity, which is called a "brain wave".

Brain waves change according to the cognitive processes that the brain is currently working through and are characterised by the time-frequency pattern of the up and down states (oscillations).

For example, there are brainwaves that are characteristic of the different phases of sleep, and patterns characteristic of various states of awareness and consciousness.

Brainwaves are detected using a technique known as electroencephalography ( EEG), where a swimming-cap like device is worn over the scalp and electrical activity detected via electrodes. The pattern of activity is then recorded and interpreted using computer software.

This kind of brain-machine interface forms the basis of neural prosthesis technology and is used to restore brain function. This may sound far-fetched, but neural prostheses are actually commonplace, just think of the Cochlear implant!

Technical telepathy

The electrical nature of the brain allows not only for sending of signals, but also for the receiving of electrical pulses. These can be delivered in a non-invasive way using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation ( TMS).

A TMS device creates a magnetic field over the scalp, which then causes an electrical current in the brain. When a TMS coil is placed over the motor cortex, the motor pathways can be activated, resulting in movement of a limb, hand or foot, or even a finger or toe.

Scientists are now working on ways to sort through all the noise in brainwaves to uncover specific signals that can then be used to create an artificial communication channel between animals.

The first demonstration of this was in a 2013 study where a pair of rats were connected through a BBI to perform a behavioural task. The connection was reinforced by giving both rats a reward when the receiver rat performed the task correctly.

Hot on the heels of this study was a demonstration that a human could control the tail movements of a rat via BBI.

We now know that BBIs can work between humans too. By combining EEG and TMS, scientists have transmitted the thought of moving a hand from one person to a separate individual, who actually moved their hand. The BBI works best when both participants are conscious cooperators in the experiment. In this case, the subjects were engaged in a computer game.

Thinking at you

The latest advance in human BBIs represents another leap forward. This is where transmission of conscious thought was achieved between two human beings in August last year.

Using a combination of technologies - including EEG, the Internet and TMS - the team of researchers was able to transmit a thought all the way from India to France.

Words were first coded into binary notation (i.e. 1 = "hola"; 0 = "ciao"). Then the resulting EEG signal from the person thinking the 1 or the 0 was transmitted to a robot-driven TMS device positioned over the visual cortex of the receiver's brain.

In this case, the TMS pulses resulted in the perception of flashes of light for the receiver, who was then able to decode this information into the original words (hola or ciao).

Now that these BBI technologies are becoming a reality, they have a huge potential to impact the way we interact with other humans. And maybe even the way we communicate with animals through direct transmission of thought.

Such technologies have obvious ethical and legal implications, however. So it is important to note that the success of BBIs depends upon the conscious coupling of the subjects.

In this respect, there is a terrific potential for BBIs to one day be integrated into psychotherapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, learning of motor skills, or even more fantastical situations akin to remote control of robots on distant planets or Vulcan-like mind melds a la Star Trek.

Soon, it might well be possible to really experience walking a mile (or a kilometre) in another person's shoes.

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Brain-to-brain interfaces: the science of telepathy

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk a mile (or 1.6 kilometres) in somebody else's shoes? Or have you ever tried to send a telepathic message to a partner in transit to "pick up milk on your way home"?