Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum mind-reading implants

I have got dibs on the first human link testing and I pick Brad Pitt as my partner ..... One word "Angelina"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23...thic-power.html

Nah, I pick Michael Douglas. That would get me next to Catherine Zeta-Jones. There you have a real beauty.

Bill Gill

Mae harddwch Cymreig go iawn!

Sorry I only understand Welsh visually. After all Catherine is visually universal. All you have to do is look at her.

Bill Gill

I know this thread has already gone to the dogs, but this is a really cool finding.

For a long time it was debated if they way one persons brain interpreted signals was the same as how another's brain would. I.E. if you took the signals from my eyes and sent them to your brain, would red look red, green look green, etc - or would things look totally different. Would the thought that leads my arm to move, move yours in the same way, etc.

This study suggests that signals are the same - or at least close enough to be interpreted. That is exciting - telepathy, "parallel processing", even mind-reading machines (brain backups, etc) are a little closer to reality now that we know this.

Bryan

Might it also mean that we have taken a step towards better communication between species?

I doubt it; the ability to communicate (as we do it) is not an innate skill of any known species. Moreover, much of our own ability to communicate is a learned behaviour - studies of feral children, for example, have shown that if basic communication skills are not learned early, that the neurological pathways required for communication simply don't form.

You may one day be able to experience the sensory input of another species, and perhaps its instinctual or learned inputs to those stimuli. But I doubt any meaningful communication will happen; indeed, in the cases of species capable of communicating with us (i.e. apes), its already apparent that the degree of communication is fundamentally limited by their relative lack of neurological capacity,

Bryan

Maybe we really have nothing to say, and once again 'the medium will be the message'.