Telekinesis and Telepathy .... Pseudoscience or science?

Today's piece of science is actually pieces of science, related to the same phenomena. One I have been wanting to write about for a long time and had planned on writing about it this week and the other paper coincidentally came out last week on the same sort of thing so I will combine them together. They are on the subject of telekinesis and telepathy (cue mandatory eye-roll). These are terms we associate with the sci-fi thrillers of yesteryear but they may be closer to reality than we think.

Both the studies I am writing about rely on the core principle that in it's most basic form all of our brains are wired in an extremely similar fashion and so brain activity in particular areas isn't entirely random and that readings of brain activity through technology such as EEG and fMRI scans may one day be able to extract useful data from someone's brain.

The first study was published in the journal of neural engineering on June 4th and can be read here. A group from the University of Minnesota have developed a new BCI (brain-computer interface). The group used the non-invasive EEG technique and used a high number of electrodes planted on the head (in order to get a more accurate reading) and from here they asked the participants to think of directional thoughts (I'll explain this in a few moments) and they recorded the brain activity. They then took several of these "thought-patterns" and told the computer that when a certain thought pattern was registered that a small remote control helicopter should do different movements and so created the first thought controlled helicopter.

Where other groups have failed in the past has been the encoding of the directional thoughts, for example, a participant may have been told to think of something vague such as "move left" in order to generate the command for the helicopter to move left. This group made it very specific and told the participant to think of forming a tight fist with their left hand - This encoded the helicopter moving left. This specific thought generated a much stronger and much more reliable thought pattern for the EEG to read and so made the movement of the helicopter more accurate.

The participants were then asked to complete a small obstacle course (two suspended rings) and to guide the helicopter through them. One of the videos can be viewed here:

The various participants performed with varying degrees of skill and the other videos can be viewed here.

This group from Minnesota has created a protocol by which an individual can control a drone with nothing but their mind (and some pre-encoding stages). The group is looking to progress this technology in to the area of prosthetics which may have huge implications for those with artificial limbs or wheelchairs.

The other paper I want to talk about takes this concept a step further and invokes a whole new level of creepiness. Taking someone's thought patterns and making them encode something, while amazing, isn't that fascinating biologically. A group from Duke University in collaboration with a group from Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute for Neuroscience in Brazil have developed a protocol (see diagram below) whereby tiny electrodes were planted into specific areas of one rats brain and then they put similar electrodes in exactly the same places in another rat. From here, they got the first rat (we'll call him the controller) to perform several tasks that included making decisions based on visual stimuli and physical stimuli. With the electrodes in the controllers brain they recorded the brain activity during the decision making process, encoded it to a computer and then transmitted the signal to the other rat so that the electrodes would generate the same thought pattern in the second rat (we'll call him the player). What happened was, when the controller was making a decision, his thoughts were then transmitted straight into the players brain and like magic that player began doing the same things and making the same decisions a remarkable percentage of the time.

Protocol for transmitting signal. Source: Pais-Vieira et al. (2013)

Source: Pais-Vieira et al. (2013)

Figure A on the right shows the percentage of the time the rats made the correct choices when the signal was transmitted into their brain. Here the encoder is our controller rat and the decoder is our player rat and the last one is a rat with no stimulation. Figure B showed that the response was fairly consistent between trials and that figure A wasn't a fluke. Figure C looks at the optimum number of electrical pulses given to the 'player' rat and there seems to be a threshold that lies somewhere between 26-40 pulses.

This study is for me (a neuroscientist) very intriguing as it shows the same electrical signal can generate the same behaviour in two distinct animals which lends evidence to the idea that the brain (at it's most basic level) has a common wiring diagram for all of us.

The groups work was published in the journal Nature (the creme-de-la-creme of science journals) earlier this year and the (open-source) paper can be viewed here for those of you who want the gory mathematics and physics behind the experiments.

So there you have it! Telekinesis and telepathy isn't all that far away after-all!  And the potential implications for humanity ... Well that's just scary!

Until next week! - This will be a Friday thing so while you are killing time at work on Friday waiting for the weekend, this can provide a little entertainment! Don't forget to share this around if you enjoy it :)