Story at-a-glance
- DARPA is funding a project to develop a headset that can read your brain’s neural activity and “write,” or encode, it to someone else’s brain, leading to brain-to-brain communication
- At least one researcher — Jacob Robinson — working on the program, known as Magnetic, Optical, Acoustic Neural Access (MOANA), is part of a team that figured out how to tap into and control the brains of fruit flies
- The team used magnetic nanoparticles to activate neurons in fruit flies, causing them to alter their wing position
- The headset being developed by the MOANA study will use light to decode neural activity in one brain and then, similar to the fruit fly study, use magnetic fields to write that activity in another brain in less than one-twentieth of a second
- The next phase of the study entails demonstrating the technology in rodents and, if successful, moving on to humans within two years, although human tests could begin as soon as 2022
U.S. scientists have achieved the previously unthinkable task of remotely controlling the brains of living beings. The beings, in this case, are genetically engineered fruit flies and the neurons responsible for causing the flies to spread their wings.1 But this is only the beginning.
Continue reading “Next Up: Remote Controlled Brain Communication?”
