Telepathic message sent across continents through internet

FOR the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of kilometres apart in India and France.

Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person’s brain to another’s even if they are thousands of kilometres away. “It is kind of technological realisation of the dream of tele­pathy, but it is definitely not magical,” Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, said from Barcelona. “We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain.”

For the experiment, one person wearing a wireless, internet-linked electro-encephalogram, or EEG, would think a simple greeting, such as “hola” or “ciao”. A computer translated the words into digital binary code in a series of 1s or 0s. This message was emailed from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who, through non-invasive brain stimulation, could see flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message.

“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,” said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “One such pathway is, of course, the internet.”

The proof of principle that was reported in the journal PLOS ONE was still rudimentary, he said. “We hope that in the longer term this could radically change the way we communicate with each other,” Professor Ruffini said.