Who would have thought that the 2009 film Gamer would be more than a kitschy sci-fi action vehicle for Gerard Butler - the movie where rich kids control real human death-row convicts to play third-person shooters with their bodies as avatars. Turns out, we're one (tiny) step closer to such a reality, thanks to researchers at the University of Washington.
Dr. Rajesh Rao, professor at the computer science and engineering school at the University of Washington is the rich kid in this real life version of Gamer, literally controlling the finger movement of a colleague across campus in what he believes is the first successful human-to-human brain interface experiment. Research assistant and fellow professor Andrea Stocco relinquished control of his finger to Rao, who made a command in a video game - with only his mind - which was recorded as brain activity and transmitted, in turn, moving Stocco's finger involuntarily to carry out the command.
"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."
The experiment was carried out using a electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain, which was hooked up to a cap, studded with electrodes, on Rao's head. Rao then looked at a computer screen with an Atari-era (re: simple) video game loaded and imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon at a target. He did not physically move his hand - he only thought about what he would do to hit the "fire" button in the computer game.
Across campus, Stocco was sitting in another room, with another computer running the same game placed behind his line of sight (a blind experiment, pun intended) and a keyboard placed near his right hand. A swimcap was on his head with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil placed directly over his left motor cortex - the region of the brain that controls hand movement.
According to the University of Washington's release, here's what happened after Rao just thought about hitting the fire button: "Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-cancelling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand movine involuntarily to that of a nervous tic."
Spooky.
You can check out video of the experiment right here - though it doesn't look as exciting as it really is:
"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said. "This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains."
According to Chantel Prat, assistant professor in psychology at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Science - and wife of Rao's new human puppet, Andrea Stocco, don't expect the Gamer scenario to happen any time soon. "I think some people will be unnerved by this because they will overestimate the technology," Prat said. "There's no possible way the technology that we have could be used on a person unknowingly or without their willing participation."
However, this kind of research is vital in learning about how brain information can non-invasively be recorded and transmitted, and down the line, the technology could actually have practical uses. Imagine a person with disabilities being able to make his or her wishes known through another or an expert surgeon taking over the hardest procedure from a remote location. Or an army of clones controlled by an evil overseer. Depends on your view of the future.