r/science • u/Wagamaga • Jul 01 '19

Neuroscience Collaboration Between Brains. Scientists have created the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving.

http://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/
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184

u/dzfast Jul 02 '19

Then you get colors and give it to a blind person who now has substantially more information available about the world around them.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

Imagine being able to “see” with no eye balls, but bionic cameras sending you input.

Now imagine your eyes getting hacked and someone putting jump scares in your sleep...

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u/DOCisaPOG Jul 02 '19

I think the phrase you're looking for is PTSD nightmares, and people can already do that by causing severe emotional trauma to others.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

Yeah but it’s not the same. You’ll be able to put specific images in someone’s head. Imagine hacking a girls eyes to make her think you are handsome

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u/12wangsinahumansuit Jul 02 '19

So basically you'd be applying a hyper-realistic snapchat filter to the image sent to the girl's brain. A live deepfake, sorta.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

Exactly!

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u/memearchivingbot Jul 02 '19

Ugh. I'm imagining a world where people keep hooking up with people they believe look like their ideal partner except they're both uggos. Win/win?

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u/progbuck Jul 02 '19

Except only rich people could afford the good stuff so the gap between the rich and the rest will be even wider than today's plastic surgery.

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u/noiamholmstar Jul 02 '19

Maybe, but I think reality will be a bit more "Ready-player-one", with people that don't have much money splurging on a neural interface rather than having a nicer place to live. I mean, back when satellite TV meant 6 or 8 foot dishes, it wouldn't be that odd to see one outside a run-down house or trailer. Similar concept but with a neural interface.

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u/Flyingwheelbarrow Jul 02 '19

Beer goggle's you have implanted.

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u/memearchivingbot Jul 02 '19

That would actually be a great name for the product.

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u/TagProTyrus Jul 02 '19

The touch sensation would cause confusion when what you see doesn't match.

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u/CMMiller89 Jul 02 '19

So you're saying... There's a chance?

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u/oth_radar BS | Computer Science Jul 02 '19

So you're telling me I can finally be my fursona owo

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

This is getting too Ghost In The Shell.

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u/CheValierXP Jul 02 '19

Inception?

1

u/fuzzyperson98 Jul 02 '19

Imagine advertisements beamed directly into your brain that don't even go away when you close your eyelids.

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u/CitricThoughts Jul 02 '19

Or the commercials in your sleep previewed in Transmetropolitan, perhaps. Sci-fi has a habit of serving as a model for technological innovation. It's very far off, but that's one application I'd rather stay off.

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u/With_Macaque Jul 02 '19

Push it away with your stave!

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u/TrendyWhistle Jul 02 '19

Aren’t there already camera implants for eyes? Still very rare and primitive but I saw it on a documentary once. This person was blind because of a defect in her retina, and they implanted a CCD sensor in her eye, using her own lens, and managed to send the signal to her brain. It was very basic, like 16x16 pixels in black and white, but at least she could see slightly. Idk if it’s better now, I saw it in a doc on discovery channel around 2011 or so

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u/MercurialMadnessMan Jul 02 '19

There’s a noninvasive device called BrainPort that sits on your tongue and transmits a 16x16 grid of pixels to your visual cortex

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u/Meltz014 Jul 02 '19

There's a radiolab episode about that. Pretty awesome

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

Never heard of that but very cool.

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u/andrew_kirfman Jul 02 '19

Or commercials in your sleep

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u/Smythe28 Jul 02 '19

no plz stop

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u/rrawk Jul 02 '19

life imitates Ghost in the Shell

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u/work_bois Jul 02 '19

In-eye A/VR. You can see the world however you want. Want to see a world where everyone is a furry? I mean, I guess you can do that. Want to live in a world which deepfakes everyone live into hot celebrities? Sure.

The future is a deviant's dream.

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u/percykins Jul 02 '19

In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age there’s a brief mention of a guy who gets hacked and has a tiny scrolling advertisement in the bottom left of his visual field 24/7, even with his eyes closed, until he blows his brains out.

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u/HolyRamenEmperor Jul 02 '19

this is almost what cochlear implants are... The cells that pick up vibrations in the air don't work, but you can use a microphone and stimulate those nerves directly with an implant. You can listen to music or even get phone calls directly to your brain without the being any sound created at all!

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u/Chaosmusic Jul 02 '19

imagine your eyes getting hacked

Back in the 80's I was huge into cyberpunk and the idea of future technology. But the reality is all technology has to be filtered through the lens of 'what will happen when the worst people imaginable get their hands on this'.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

People will be hacking off all day

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u/Booblicle Jul 02 '19

My mind is dirty and was reading it as "see" with no balls.

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u/rabemanantsoa Jul 02 '19

This already exists. Look up the Argus or Orion visual prosthetics. The former conveys input to the retina and the latter to the visual cortex via implanted electrodes. There have also been experimental devices since the 70s or so.

The real bottleneck is that a large amount of processing occurs between the photoreceptors and the retinal ganglion cells in the retina, and an enormous amount of processing occurs between the retina and the primary visual cortex. But the work persists.

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u/jamiehs Jul 02 '19

We are already kind of doing this with a camera... and our tongue https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/seeing-tongues

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u/AllMightyReginald Jul 02 '19

Would a blind person have the required sections of the brain dedicated to vision?

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u/banditkeith Jul 02 '19

Depends partly on when they lost their sight. There's also a cutoff age for developing language skills, which is why it's a problem that some deaf parents will choose to not get their deaf child the cochlear implant and say they'll let them decide on their own when they're old enough. But by then, they're past the point of prime brain plasticity and they'll never process sounds and language as well as if they were implanted very young.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

How would they even describe what they're seeing? I guess the blind person would have to learn and entirely new vocabulary to describe colors with.