Researcher controls colleague’s motions in 1st human brain-to-brain interface

August 27, 2013                 Doree Armstrong and Michelle Ma

Posted under: Engineering, News Releases, Research, Science, Technology

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

University of Washington

University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind. Across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco, right, wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain. Stocco’s right index finger moved involuntarily to hit the “fire” button as part of the first human brain-to-brain interface demonstration.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”

The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. The following version has been edited for length. This video and high-resolution photos also are available on the research website.

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

“It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said. “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.”

University of Washington

The cycle of the experiment. Brain signals from the “Sender” are recorded. When the computer detects imagined hand movements, a “fire” command is transmitted over the Internet to the TMS machine, which causes an upward movement of the right hand of the “Receiver.” This usually results in the “fire” key being hit.

The technologies used by the researchers for recording and stimulating the brain are both well-known. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is routinely used by clinicians and researchers to record brain activity noninvasively from the scalp. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a noninvasive way of delivering stimulation to the brain to elicit a response. Its effect depends on where the coil is placed; in this case, it was placed directly over the brain region that controls a person’s right hand. By activating these neurons, the stimulation convinced the brain that it needed to move the right hand.

Computer science and engineering undergraduates Matthew Bryan, Bryan Djunaedi, Joseph Wu and Alex Dadgar, along with bioengineering graduate student Dev Sarma, wrote the computer code for the project, translating Rao’s brain signals into a command for Stocco’s brain.

“Brain-computer interface is something people have been talking about for a long, long time,” said Chantel Prat, assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and Stocco’s wife and research partner who helped conduct the experiment. “We plugged a brain into the most complex computer anyone has ever studied, and that is another brain.”

At first blush, this breakthrough brings to mind all kinds of science fiction scenarios. Stocco jokingly referred to it as a “Vulcan mind meld.” But Rao cautioned this technology only reads certain kinds of simple brain signals, not a person’s thoughts. And it doesn’t give anyone the ability to control your actions against your will.

Both researchers were in the lab wearing highly specialized equipment and under ideal conditions. They also had to obtain and follow a stringent set of international human-subject testing rules to conduct the demonstration.

“I think some people will be unnerved by this because they will overestimate the technology,” Prat said. “There’s no possible way the technology that we have could be used on a person unknowingly or without their willing participation.”

Stocco said years from now the technology could be used, for example, by someone on the ground to help a flight attendant or passenger land an airplane if the pilot becomes incapacitated. Or a person with disabilities could communicate his or her wish, say, for food or water. The brain signals from one person to another would work even if they didn’t speak the same language.

Rao and Stocco next plan to conduct an experiment that would transmit more complex information from one brain to the other. If that works, they then will conduct the experiment on a larger pool of subjects.

Their research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the UW, the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Rao at rao@cs.washington.edu or 206-685-9141, and Stocco at stocco@uw.edu or 206-685-8610. Video and high-resolution photos are available on the research website.

Tagged with: Andrea Stocco, brain, Chantel Prat, College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, psychology, Rajesh Rao

Unafraid of alienating themselves

Two Maine men who claim they were abducted by extraterrestrials aren't shy about retelling their stories

By Matt Byrne mbyrne@pressherald.com
Staff Writer

By their own account, there may be no good, earthly reason for Jim Weiner and Chuck Foltz to do what they plan to this weekend.

Chuck Foltz, left, and Jim Weiner, both of whom say they were abducted by a UFO in 1976 in Allagash, are among the participants at the “Experiencers Speak” convention.

Tim Greenway/Staff Photographer

A drawing from a book by Raymond E. Fowler drawn by Chuck Foltz shows an aerial view of the canoe.

Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer

Select images available for purchase in the
Maine Today Photo Store

There is neither a fortune to be made nor fame to acquire.

Yet on Sunday evening before a crowd of strangers and old friends, the two longtime buddies will recount in stunning detail their recollection of the night, nearly 40 years ago, when they say they and two others were plucked from a canoe on Eagle Lake in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and taken aboard an alien spacecraft.

"Number one, we have nothing to gain by this except public ridicule," said Foltz, 63. "Our goal would be to enlighten, inform and put some type of positive direction on this."

At the second annual "Experiencers Speak" conference, which began Friday and ends Sunday at the Clarion Hotel in Portland, Weiner, Foltz and more than a dozen other speakers will tell their stories of close encounters. Weiner and Foltz's will be the final presentation, scheduled for Sunday evening, in a slate of programs meant to provide comfort and understanding for a group of people whose experiences nearly by definition relegate them to the fringe.

That little of what will be said can be independently verified is of little concern to the believers, for their knowledge is firsthand, many say.

"The goal is to help experiencers come to terms with what's happening to them, and get over their fears and get on with their lives," said Audrey Hewins of Oxford, the organizer of the conference and whose regional group, Starborn Support, hosts monthly meetings for a few dozen people to help them cope with their abduction or close-encounter experience.

In the world of ufology -- the oft-marginalized study of unidentified flying objects and the accompanying foreign beings that purportedly interact with people on Earth -- the "Allagash incident" ranks among the most substantiated in the United States.

The case was the subject of a 1993 book, "The Allagash Abductions," by longtime UFO investigator Raymond E. Fowler, which bills itself as "undeniable evidence of alien intervention" into human life. The tome is a relatively straightforward account of how Fowler encountered the four men, interviewed them and had them undergo regression hypnosis -- a form of guided relaxation that purports to allow people to retrieve lost or repressed memories.

Through independent sessions of hypnosis performed years after the 1976 encounter, Weiner, Foltz, Weiner's twin brother, Jack, and a fourth companion, Charles Rak, each recounted slightly different versions of the same, horrifying story of being used as human test subjects by an advanced, celestial race of humanoid figures who took them aboard their craft that night.

When they were asked about the experience during an interview Friday, the voices of Jim Weiner and Foltz did not not waver. Their gaze maintained a steady intensity as they recalled the brilliant orb of light that first hovered over the trees. They described a beam of light emanating from the orb and surrounding them, before they were whisked to parts unknown.

The experience aboard the craft, where they were probed and tested by four-fingered beings with almond-shaped eyes and languid limbs, appeared to have taken about two hours, according to their accounts.

But when the experience occurred, the group of four felt no gap in time. Only later, when a large campfire built to burn for hours had seemingly died down in a matter of minutes, did they realize they had "lost time," a blind spot in their recollections that was only filled in later under deep hypnosis.

The steadfastness of their story has not deterred a legion of doubters, debunkers and verbal assailants, though. They've been called crazy more times than they care to remember.

Jack Weiner, 61, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and cannot easily travel from his Vermont home, said in a telephone interview Friday that his experience in Allagash refocused his career away from the arts and toward hard science and mathematics. He doesn't care whether people believe his story, he said, and dismisses debunkers as close-minded and sometimes ignorant of the breadth of scientific knowledge.

"They weren't there," Jack Weiner said. "I didn't see them there. If they want to stay ignorant, there's nothing I can do to change them. I know differently from my own experience."

Rak, the fourth member of the canoe party, has been out of contact with the group for more than two decades and could not be located for an interview.

But that does not deter Jim Weiner and Foltz, who are both from the Boston area, from pursuing further study and inquiry into what they believe is a global effort by world governments to systematically conceal from the public the truth about the existence of alien life.

The nay-saying crowd, Weiner said, is a product of some restrictive worldview that cannot possibly fathom that aliens exist.

"What we describe threatens them in some way," said Weiner, who works in information technology at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Be it social, religious or scientific beliefs, he said, "the only way they can maintain a sense of self is by denial or accusation. It's much easier to say, 'Oh, you're making it up,' or, 'Oh, you're crazy,' or, 'You're a fraud.'"

Joe Cambria, who operates the New England UFO Research Organization and a companion hotline for witnesses to report sightings, said he receives a steady stream of calls, the vast majority -- as high as 90 percent -- from hoaxsters and phonies.

"Then that final 10 percent is what's interesting," he said.

Skepticism is a requirement for any serious UFO inquiry, said Cambria, of Wakefield, Mass. He is even skeptical of the use of the word "abduction."

"People are having (internal) experiences," said Cambria, his voice rising.

"But kidnappings? Something's been going on out there, and it's been going on out there since recorded time. We don't have an answer for it, but we continue to study it."

The conference had a sold-out dinner for 60 Friday night, said Hewins, who expects more than 100 people to attend the sessions over the weekend.

Matt Byrne can be contacted at at 791-6303 or at:

mbyrne@pressherald.com