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[Gottii]

http://now.msn.com/human-mind-control-could-be-soon-a-reality

[Saede Riordan]

So who's joining my hivemind when this goes commercial? Any takers?

[Victoria Stecker]

So who's joining my hivemind when this goes commercial? Any takers?

From what I've seen of your mind?

No.

 

[Saede Riordan]

♥

[hellgremlin]

I have a quibble with this. It isn't mind control. It's impulse transmission.

The guy being tested said that his hand movements felt like an involuntary muscle twitch. If it was mind control, the guy would assume it was his idea to move his hand in the first place, rather than register it as foreign input or an anomalous muscle reaction.

[Victoria Stecker]

Yeah, the claims that it was mind control, the talk about being able to share thoughts and knowledge, etc, are a bit overblown. What was actually done was more like a doctor tapping a patient's knee to check reflex.

[Esna Pitoojee]

The technology here isn't as initially shocking as it might seem; the equipment to both crudely "read" brain impulses and to "imprint" impulses onto another brain has been around for some time (I've seen some very interesting studies on pain reduction via magnetic stimulation). Making the digital connection was not that tricky either; you're essentially getting two highly similar pieces of equipment to talk to each other.

What I would be more interested to see is how they went about "targeting" the correct area of the brain in the reciever - i.e., was it neccesary to pinpoint a relatively small number of neurons to be triggered, or for something so crude could we go about stimulating a fair large (say, few hundred thousand) group of neurons?

If the former was the case, did they take two subjects whose "move this finger!" brain impulses were physically in near-identical locations in the brain and use similarly-targeted magnetic impulses, or did they have to study both subjects to locate the "move finger" neuron group and independently target the group in each subject's brain.

[Saede Riordan]

If the former was the case, did they take two subjects whose "move this finger!" brain impulses were physically in near-identical locations in the brain and use similarly-targeted magnetic impulses, or did they have to study both subjects to locate the "move finger" neuron group and independently target the group in each subject's brain.

Actually the 'move finger' neurons, along with a lot of other areas of the brain, are fairly similar at a macroscopic level, so targeting wouldn't be all that difficult. You could probably put those devices on anyone's head and have them work.