Creating Hive Minds
Creating hive minds.
This is your Brain….This is Your Brain as a Weapon
On an otherwise routine July day, inside a laboratory at Duke University, two rhesus monkeys sat in separate rooms, each watching a computer screen that featured an image of a virtual arm in two-dimensional space. The monkeys’ task was to guide the arm from the center of the screen to a target, and when they did so successfully, the researchers rewarded them with sips of juice.
But there was a twist. The monkeys were not provided with joysticks or any other devices that could manipulate the arm. Rather, they were relying on electrodes implanted in portions of their brains that influence movement. The electrodes were able to capture and transmit neural activity through a wired connection to the computers.
Making things even more interesting, the primates shared control over the digital limb. In one experiment, for example, one monkey could direct only horizontal actions, while the other guided just vertical motions. Yet the monkeys began to learn by association that a particular way of thinking resulted in the movement of the limb. After grasping this pattern of cause and effect, they kept up the behavior–joint thinking, essentially–that led the arm to the target and earned them juice.
Research Links:
Monkey use minds to move 2 virtual arms
Monkey drive wheelchairs using only their thoughts
Monkeys control robot arm using brain signals
Additional Info:
BRAINS ON CHIPS | Hybrid Processors
DARPA Creating the Ultimate Super Soldiers With Brain Implants
Transcendence: Resurrecting the Dead Using Post Mortum Brain Maps
Creating hive minds discussed the phenomena of the 100th monkey syndrome and the ability to connect brains through a computer interface to control remote biological actions using a computer interface to effect an anatomical response.
