‘I emailed a message between two brains’

Could we one day hook up our brains to the internet? Rose Eveleth investigates a claim for the ‘first’ online message sent between two minds.

As internet connections become faster and more of the devices we carry help keep us online, it can sometimes feel like we’re on the verge of spontaneous email communication. I send an email, you receive it, open it, and respond – all in a matter of seconds. Regardless of whether you think near-instant communication is a good thing or not, it’s certainly happening. Not long ago we routinely waited days or weeks for a letter – today even waiting hours for a reply can feel like an eternity.

Perhaps the ultimate way to speed up online communication would be to push towards direct brain-to-brain communication over the web. If brains were directly connected, there would be no more need for pesky typing – we could simply think of an idea and send it instantly to a friend, whether they are in the same room or half the world away. We’re not there yet, of course, but a recent study took a first step in that direction, claiming direct brain-to-brain communication over the internet between people thousands of miles from one another.

The work is simply a proof of concept, as Giulio Ruffini, one of the researchers on the project – and CEO of Starlab, based in Barcelona – is quick to explain. The team did not, as some reported, send words or thoughts or emotions from one brain to another. Instead they did something much simpler.

Here’s how it worked. One subject – in this case a man in Kerala, India – was fitted with a brain-computer interface that records brainwaves through the scalp. That person was then instructed to imagine they were moving either their hands, or their feet. If he imagined moving his feet, the computer recorded a zero. If he imagined moving his hands, it recorded a one.

This string of zeros and ones was then sent through the internet to a receiver: a man in Strasbourg, France. He was fitted with something called a TMS robot – a robot designed to deliver strong but short electrical pulses to the brain. When the sender thought about moving his hands, the TMS robot zapped the receiver’s brain in a way that made him see light – even though his eyes were closed. The receiver saw no light if the sender thought about moving his feet.

To make the message more meaningful, the researchers came up with a cipher: one string of zeros and ones (or hands and feet) meant “hola” and another meant “ciao”. The receiver – who had also been taught the cipher – could then decode the signal of lights to interpret which word the sender had sent.

This might sound simple, but at each stage there are complications. The sender has to concentrate extremely hard to focus only on imagining moving their hands or feet. Any other activity in the brain can cloud the signal, and make it hard to pick up the message. In fact, the sender had to be trained in how to do this properly.

The whole process isn’t fast, either. The researchers estimated that from brain to brain the transmission speed was about two bits (a zero and a one) per minute. So to get even a simple message from one brain to another would take a while. But when it happened, and it worked, Ruffini says it was exciting.

“I mean, you can look at this experiment in two ways,” he says. “On the one hand it’s quite technical and a very humble proof of concept. On the other hand, this was the first time it was done, so it was a little bit of a historical moment I suppose, and it was pretty exciting. After all the years thinking about it and finding the means to do it, it felt pretty good."