Slowly over the last few years, and a little more quickly in recent months, technology has begun to move towards solutions that allow people to communicate with each other without using words. In their place, electronic transmissions through devices capable of encoding our brain waves into information.
Exact. It is a computer-assisted telepathy. An electronic telepathy. And it can soon become one of the most profitable businesses on the planet.
In April, a team of scientists from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University he published in the journal Nature a paper detailing the phases of an ambitious experiment conducted just before.
Artificial telepathy: the study
Three volunteers worked together to play a simplified version of the Tetris video game. Two of the researchers had access to the full view of the screen and the blocks to fit into the popular puzzle.
Using their thoughts, they mentally sent “telepathic” commands to a third researcher whose screen did not show the location of the blocks. The third researcher continued the game by "hearing" the commands sent by the other two.
Follow up of the study
Five months later, this September, the medical company Synchron announced that it had successfully tested a more advanced stage of “telepathic” technology. A technology based on a sensor that for the first time does not require a small hole to be made in the user's skull to be implanted. It's not a small thing. Telepathy between two people (or more) becomes an advantageous option, compared to a non-invasive procedure.
Synchron's thin, flexible array of electrical sensors, also called a “stentrode,” travels through the bloodstream to the brain, parks itself nearby, and begins reading neural activity. Mental telepathy, in short, of course, but electronic.
The stentrode can remotely transmit data to other devices: “smart” prostheses, or other implants that sit in the brains of others and produce telepathic abilities.
Put together the April and September study, again on telepathic communication. Combine brain-to-brain communication with the non-invasive stentrode and you have the potential picture of a safe and relatively inexpensive form of electronic artificial telepathy.
It's all already here
“The underlying technology is not as futuristic as you would expect,” he says Jacob Robinson, a neuro engineer at Rice University on the next brain-computer interfaces that will allow, among other things, this technological form of telepathic contact.
Of course, in their current form they appear really primitive and in some cases a little bloody. I mean, Elon Musk can present his Neuralink “sewing machine”. in the most charming way possible, but he will always have to convince me to make a little window in my head and attach wires to my brain to become telepathic. Apart from everything, however, they are technologies that already show effectiveness. It is therefore not surprising that big players like Facebook have entered the game, even with "cleaner" solutions.
Today our devices require enormous typing activity and attention (sometimes even fatal: later we will talk about smartphone reading accidents). Tomorrow's cell phones will write under our mental dictation. The ones after that, well… the ones after that might not even be cell phones. We could subscribe to an electronic telepathy service, with unlimited mind-to-mind calls. Use telepathy like making normal phone calls today. There will also be free telepathy offers, I imagine, but fewer things will be perceived.
The advent of Menlo Park and online telepathy
In 2017, Facebook launched its internal initiative to build “a wearable, non-invasive device” that would allow people to write by simply imagining doing so.
The social giant has also funded external researchers (such as neurosurgeon Eddie Chang of the University of California) and acquired promising startups such as CTRL Labs.
Facebook's efforts began to show results in July 2019, when Chang and other team members announced they had produced the translating brain activity into text with 76% accuracy.
The way still to go towards electronic telepathy
The way to go? I summarize: It's one thing to send one command at a time, even between three different brains (and with 81% accuracy), it's another to encode and transmit complex messages.
The BrainNet team (this is the name of the group) uses EEG and TMS technologies. Both non-invasive but a little imprecise. Surgical implants are more accurate, but still have no health guarantees.
There are also ethical issues, first of all those relating to the risks of mental manipulation or the cancellation of privacy.
The doubts and questions aren't slowing development, though: Advances by scientists and companies are taking telepathy from mere fantasy to potential commercial technology. Real laboratory mice, researchers who dedicate their souls to the cause, are really arriving at telepathy.
