Thread: New Telepathy Experiment

Snoop, I feel, is on the right track here. Though I think what they did went just a tad further than that. We already have sign language and Morse code, as snoop pointed out, and other means of 'telepathy'. Indeed, speaking is a kind of acoustic telepathy. So chatting on our phones would be more impressive than the experiment at hand, if it were that simple.

BUT. I think that what they did (and this is only speculation), is that they found out what sort of patterns of brain activity are associated with a given symbol/word for the sender and for the receiver. Since information like that is stored differently in each brain (though in the same general area), these patterns are NOT compatible. We learn different words differently and associate different things with them. That's where the computer comes to play, I think. As a translator. They probably stored pre-established information (symbols AND their respective brain activity patterns for the sender and for the receiver) on a server. The sender then thought of a word ('hello', for example). The sender's brain activity was digitized, analyzed by the server, and recognized for the word it was. The server, then, swapped that info with the receiver's digitized brain activity pattern of 'hello' and sent signals into the receiver's headset in order to stimulate the necessary parts of the brain to trigger one of those good old 'hello'-moments

I'm quite sure that's about as clever as they got, so keep your seats That would be, indeed, very rudimentary. But it goes a bit further in trying to reconcile the individuality of our brains than, say, sign language. It still requires a lot of individual calibration, though, both on the part of the sender and the receiver, so as far as I can see, this method is far from being convenient, or terribly practical. It's light years away from merging two minds. In fact, even my theory of how they did it might be pushing it a little. Though, frankly, anything less than that would be even less impressive. (Ah, the novels of Philip K. Dick have spoiled me, I guess!)

Still, it might make a huge difference for people with certain handicaps! As for the more fortunate of us, let us rejoice and praise the myriad forms of telepathy already at our disposal