By Ian Ortega
An Indian scientist at the University of Washington has performed the world’s first ever non-invasive human-to-human brain interface, in which one researcher was able to send a brain signal via the internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.
Rajesh Rao used Electroencephalography or EEG — routinely used to record brain activity non-invasively from the scalp — to play a computer game with his mind.
Rao looked at a computer screen and a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button.
Rao, a professor of computer science and engineering who has been working on brain-computer interfacing for more than a decade, said, “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain. 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.”