The Vulcan mind meld is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Scientists have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats, enabling one to apparently share information with the other. And unlike the Vulcan technique, there’s no need for close contact: Using an Internet connection, one rat in Brazil sent signals to the brain of a rat in North Carolina.
Similar experimental setups may help scientists probe how the brain’s circuitry incorporates information and perhaps even lead to some kind of organic computer of interconnected brains, says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, who led the study.
Other researchers are skeptical. The experiments, reported online February 28 in Scientific Reports, have a gee-whiz quality but they don’t expand science’s understanding of brain-body interactions and have little practical use, says neuroscientist Lee Miller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Years of research into how the brain and body communicate have led to brain-machine interfaces such as artificial limbs that can be controlled by signals collected by tiny microchips implanted in the brain. Much research is also dedicated to the inverse — sending signals to the brain to achieve sensations in the body, as a cochlear implant can to overcome hearing loss. In the new study, the scientists put the two together. Using pairs of rats, the researchers extracted information from one rodent brain and sent information to the brain of another.