New Telepathy Experiment

[kadie]

So I came across this article this morning via yahoo news. 'Telepathy' experiment sends 1st mental message What do you think? Is this a break through or BS?

[EbbTide000]

Interesting kadie I will copy it here. It was posted 13 hours ago and has allready 733 comments. Some of the comments I've read are hilarious. ★★★ 13 hours ago Washington (AFP) - For the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of miles apart in India and France. Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person's brain to another's even, as in this case, if they are thousands of miles away. "It is kind of technological realization of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, told AFP by phone from Barcelona. "We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain." For the experiment, one person wearing a wireless, Internet-linked electroencephalogram or EEG would think a simple greeting, like "hola," or "ciao." A computer translated the words into digital binary code, presented by a series of 1s or 0s. Then, this message was emailed from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who through non-invasive brain stimulation could see flashes of light in their peripheral vision. The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message. "We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'" Ruffini added that extra care was taken to make sure no sensory information got in the way that could have influenced the interpretation of the message. Researchers have been attempting to send a message from person to person this way for about a decade, and the proof of principle that was reported in the journal PLOS ONE is still rudimentary, he told AFP. "We hope that in the longer term this could radically change the way we communicate with each other," said Ruffini. ★★★ To be honest kadie, I don't understand what they did. It don't sound like conventional telepathy. Maybe computer geeks would get it.

[kadie]

I think its kind of scarey that a computer was used. Reminds me of the movie with Johnny Depp, Transcendence. Do you think this experiment might have applications for making computers more human like? Anyway, I brought it up because of an earlier conversation on a thread here where members were debating if telepathy could be proven given today's technological advances. So I guess we are on our way to understanding not only telepathy, but RV and AT as well as SD.

[snoop]

I get what they did, it's the simplest way I could imagine establishing a connection from brain-to-brain. What they did was take information generated by the brain, translated it into something "meaningful" that could be transferred using wires across the world, and then transmitted it to another brain via electromagnetism, one of the easiest ways to stimulate the brain non-invasively (invasively stimulating the brain, for example, would be implanting electrodes that directly stimulate the cortex). The message became flashes of light, so essentially they successfully sent flashes of light from one brain to another brain. Rather crude and rudimentary, yes, but it serves its purpose of proving the concept is possible well enough.

[mowglycdb]

If it can translate what an animal is thinking and being able to recieve the message would be badass.

[kadie]

Weellll...there are people that claim they can communicate with animals. So this experiment seems to confirm that the way we communicate in a telepathic sense is via electromagnetism?

[snoop]

More or less. The communication that was made was meaningless in the sense that a human couldn't really decipher what somebody was "saying" with the flashes (unless using them like morse code). If not for the fact that they knew how many flashes should... well, flash, to the second person, then they wouldn't have been able to tell if it worked at all. To use the flashes like morse code requires that two people know how to communicate to and with one another using the code. Communicating with an animal is another beast all on its own, to communicate with it using the methods they used here, the animal would have to have knowledge of morse code as well, otherwise it would have no idea what the flashes were.

[mowglycdb]

More or less. The communication that was made was meaningless in the sense that a human couldn't really decipher what somebody was "saying" with the flashes (unless using them like morse code). If not for the fact that they knew how many flashes should... well, flash, to the second person, then they wouldn't have been able to tell if it worked at all. To use the flashes like morse code requires that two people know how to communicate to and with one another using the code. Communicating with an animal is another beast all on its own, to communicate with it using the methods they used here, the animal would have to have knowledge of morse code as well, otherwise it would have no idea what the flashes were. The idea is for the machine to indentify the intention of the sender not only if the sender is saying things in his/her mind. I think it's easier to translate the intention of an animal through the EEG than to send a message to an animal's brain, two way seems complicated.

[StephL]

Sounds like the experiments described in this thread: http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...wn-dreams.html Not very "beyondish", though - but reality already.

[kadie]

More or less. The communication that was made was meaningless in the sense that a human couldn't really decipher what somebody was "saying" with the flashes (unless using them like morse code). If not for the fact that they knew how many flashes should... well, flash, to the second person, then they wouldn't have been able to tell if it worked at all. To use the flashes like morse code requires that two people know how to communicate to and with one another using the code. Communicating with an animal is another beast all on its own, to communicate with it using the methods they used here, the animal would have to have knowledge of morse code as well, otherwise it would have no idea what the flashes were. Naa, you wouldn't need to know Morse code to relay that you saw 5 flashes of light.

[snoop]

Well, what I mean is that the application of the flashes of light to actually be able to communicate anything would need to be made into like a "language" of sorts. Morse code was just a good example of how the various speeds of flashes or sounds, specific lengths of pauses, etc. is a method already established of making sense out of what would normally be considered nothing, just meaningless gibberish. It doesn't have to be Morse code, but it's just a "language" that already exists and so is easier than making a new one altogether. That way, these flashes that we have "telepathically" sent to each other could actually hold meaning and be used to communicate something. As it stands right now, the flashes that they have sent are just a proof of concept, that "telepathic" communication is possible.

[calielizabeth]

I have experienced telepathy. My ex best friend who I will not name, read my mind and i read his. Neither of us can read each others' minds anymore, the weird connection between us went away. But it was beautiful until I found out his secret and he threatened to kill me. So yeah, telepathy is NOT a good thing unless there's absolute trust and no evil involved. I don't want to be a telepath except maybe in heaven when on DMT, something that can happen in isolation and that I can still have privacy/space in my mind that is for me and God alone, and no one else reading my mind, unless I let them in and they let me in theirs, and there is no evil to read. I hate evil.

[SourCherryBoy]

Snoop, I feel, is on the right track here. Though I think what they did went just a tad further than that. We already have sign language and Morse code, as snoop pointed out, and other means of 'telepathy'. Indeed, speaking is a kind of acoustic telepathy. So chatting on our phones would be more impressive than the experiment at hand, if it were that simple. BUT. I think that what they did (and this is only speculation), is that they found out what sort of patterns of brain activity are associated with a given symbol/word for the sender and for the receiver. Since information like that is stored differently in each brain (though in the same general area), these patterns are NOT compatible. We learn different words differently and associate different things with them. That's where the computer comes to play, I think. As a translator. They probably stored pre-established information (symbols AND their respective brain activity patterns for the sender and for the receiver) on a server. The sender then thought of a word ('hello', for example). The sender's brain activity was digitized, analyzed by the server, and recognized for the word it was. The server, then, swapped that info with the receiver's digitized brain activity pattern of 'hello' and sent signals into the receiver's headset in order to stimulate the necessary parts of the brain to trigger one of those good old 'hello'-moments I'm quite sure that's about as clever as they got, so keep your seats That would be, indeed, very rudimentary. But it goes a bit further in trying to reconcile the individuality of our brains than, say, sign language. It still requires a lot of individual calibration, though, both on the part of the sender and the receiver, so as far as I can see, this method is far from being convenient, or terribly practical. It's light years away from merging two minds. In fact, even my theory of how they did it might be pushing it a little. Though, frankly, anything less than that would be even less impressive. (Ah, the novels of Philip K. Dick have spoiled me, I guess!) Still, it might make a huge difference for people with certain handicaps! As for the more fortunate of us, let us rejoice and praise the myriad forms of telepathy already at our disposal