Have you ever wanted to think the TV on, or order food just by being hungry, or tell someone a secret without everyone else hearing? It sounds like a sci-fi concept, but scientists from the US, France, and Spain have taken the first steps towards brain to brain communication, by sending a message from India To France through two human brains.

3newz reports "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," says 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?'"

By utilizing an electroencephalogram connected to the Internet and transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which electromagnetic induction is used to externally stimulate a brain, it proved possible to communicate information from one human brain to another, the researchers report. All of this was done without any invasive proceedures. 

Scientists have been able to look at brain waves for years with EEG meteres, as our brains essentially function electricaly. The tricky part is creating a device that can translate and send these brain waves to another brain.

The process is still a bit more clunky than thinking on the tv. It begins with the sender translating the letters of a word into a binary code, while an EEG cap that measures electical activity in the brain, reads the signals this mental excercise produces.

That sequence was then emailed to a lab in France, where a device used transcranial magnetic stimulation to non-invasively transmit the numbers into the brains of the other three test subjects.

Depending on whether it was relaying a 1 or a 0, it would stimulate their brain using either one intensity of electromagnetic pulse, or another. This in turn caused the test subjects to either see a phosphene (a flash of light) in their peripheral vision, or not see one - if they saw a flash, they knew it meant 1, while no flash meant 2. By translating that sequence of numbers back into text, they could figure out what the words were.

The participants were able to determine the word the originating subject was thinking of, using only the interface.

While this is a shaky first step the broader implications are, quite simply staggering. This could be the end of language based communication as we know it, the end of speaking as we know it. It is very easy to overspeculate the long term implicatons of early clinical research, but the potential changes to society this technology could bring about are too staggering not to. Even the abstract from the study claims that " hyperinteraction technologies will eventually have a profound impact on the social structure of our civilization and raise important ethical issuse" 

The abstract from the study reads:

"Human sensory and motor systems provide the natural means for the exchange of information between individuals, and, hence, the basis for human civilization. The recent development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has provided an important element for the creation of brain-to-brain communication systems, and precise brain stimulation techniques are now available for the realization of non-invasive computer-brain interfaces (CBI). These technologies, BCI and CBI, can be combined to realize the vision of non-invasive, computer-mediated brain-to-brain (B2B) communication between subjects (hyperinteraction). Here we demonstrate the conscious transmission of information between human brains through the intact scalp and without intervention of motor or peripheral sensory systems. Pseudo-random binary streams encoding words were transmitted between the minds of emitter and receiver subjects separated by great distances, representing the realization of the first human brain-to-brain interface. In a series of experiments, we established internet-mediated B2B communication by combining a BCI based on voluntary motor imagery-controlled electroencephalographic (EEG) changes with a CBI inducing the conscious perception of phosphenes (light flashes) through neuronavigated, robotized transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), with special care taken to block sensory (tactile, visual or auditory) cues. Our results provide a critical proof-of-principle demonstration for the development of conscious B2B communication technologies. More fully developed, related implementations will open new research venues in cognitive, social and clinical neuroscience and the scientific study of consciousness. We envision that hyperinteraction technologies will eventually have a profound impact on the social structure of our civilization and raise important ethical issues."

The possible applications are virtually endless. One example, they noted, would be using such technology to allow communication with patients who've suffered a stroke. The larger implication; however, is that this could replace tradition modes of communication, like writing and speaking. 

"We anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely," the researchers say.

This means an individual might someday communicate with someone without the need to vocalize speech or verbally express an emotion.

Tech Times reports the doctors invovled have said, "The widespread use of human brain-to-brain technologically mediated communication will create novel possibilities for human interrelation with broad social implications that will require new ethical and legislative responses," they say.

Gizmag reports, "By using advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and noninvasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write," said Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "We believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the feasibility of complementing or bypassing traditional language-based or motor-based communication."

The study was conducted by researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, collaborated with scientists from Starlab Barcelona in Spain and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg, France.