British scientists network rats' brains

4 Mar 2013

Scientists have connected the brains of lab-rats, allowing them to communicate directly via cables.

BBC News reported that wired implants allowed one rat to send its sensory and motor skills to another, "creating the first brain-to-brain interface."

"Until recently we used to record this brain activity and send it to a computer and the [computer] then tells us what the animal is going to do," Prof Miguel Nicolelis told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

The scientists set up a series of tests with one encoder rat, and another decoder rat. They then trained the rats to work together.

After this training was complete they put the rats in separate chambers and had them solve a few simple tasks.

The encoder rat was put in a chamber where it had cues to tell it if it hit the right lever to get some water, the decoder rat only had signals from the encoder to go on.

The decoder rat managed to interpret the correct levers about 70% of the time.

The scientists replicated this result over a long distance with a rat at Duke University, and another at the University of Natal in Brazil.

Source: I-Net Bridge

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