A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI)
enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor
information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an ‘encoder’ rat
performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of
tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of
its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a
‘decoder’ rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS).
The decoder rat learned to make
similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the
encoder rat's brain. These results demonstrated that a complex system was
formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads
or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process, and store information and,
hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and
for biological computing devices.
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