WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We already have the technology to communicate with people and machines telepathically, but it’s basic and slow, now money’s coming in to improve it. Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Over...
Now, in another breakthrough wireless communication directly between human brains, in other words Brain to Brain telepathic communication, is one step closer to reality thanks to a $8 million US Department of Defense grant for a team of neuro-engineers at Rice University.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, which funded the team’s proof-of-principle research toward a wireless brain link in 2018, has now asked for a preclinical demonstration of the technology that could set the stage for human tests as early as 2022.
“We started this in a very exploratory phase,” said Rice’s Jacob Robinson, lead investigator on the MOANA Project, which ultimately hopes to create a dual-function, wireless headset capable of both “reading” and “writing” brain activity to help restore lost sensory function, all without the need for invasive surgery.
See how the tech works and what it can do
MOANA, which is short for “Magnetic, Optical and Acoustic Neural Access,” will use light to decode neural activity in one brain and magnetic fields to encode that activity in another brain, all in less than one-twentieth of a second.
“What we’ve shown is that there is promise,” he said. “With the little bit of light that we are able to collect through the skull, we were able to reconstruct the activity of cells that were grown in the lab. Similarly, we showed we could stimulate lab-grown cells in a very precise way with magnetic fields and magnetic nanoparticles.”
Robinson, who’s orchestrating the efforts of 16 research groups from four states, said the second round of DARPA funding will allow the team to “develop this further into a system and to demonstrate that this system can work in a real brain, beginning with rodents.”
If the demonstrations are successful, he said the team could begin working with human patients within two years.
“Most immediately, we’re thinking about ways we can help patients who are blind,” Robinson said. “In individuals who have lost the ability to see, scientists have shown that stimulating parts of the brain associated with vision can give those patients a sense of vision, even though their eyes no longer work.”
The MOANA team includes 15 co-investigators from Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, Duke University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale’s John B. Pierce Laboratory.
The project is funded through DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program.
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