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(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
BY MATT MORENO
ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
Mind-readers are a staple of sci-fi movies or bad TV, but new technology could soon make mind-reading devices a reality.
Scientists at Duke University have developed a mind reading device for rats that gives them shared thoughts.
[Source: BBC]
“On the right lever, the light showed up, the animal got it, the encoder is transmitting information to the decoder. the decoder is now decoding the message, presses the right button, and get the reward.”
[Video: New Scientist]
The rats were connected by a wire sending signals from encoder to decoder. And the scientists at Duke tested rats as far away as Brazil and got similar results.
They connected one rat’s brain to another via fine wire and extended it over the internet. The rat’s brains could communicate from thousands of miles away.
[Source: The Independent]
But, lead neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis isn’t stopping there. He told NBC News information could extend to other senses and many more rats.
“You could think about taste, vision — I don’t see any problem doing this,” he said. Adding, “I could see a swarm of rats be informed by one rat."
Nicolelis’s group is known for going above and beyond with some wild experiments.
Wired reports the scientists have previously given monkeys an artificial sense of touch of virtual objects. Most recently, Nicolelis’s group gave rats the ability to detect normally invisible infrared light.
But, the study’s results doesn’t have everyone convinced. In the study, the decoder rat pressed the right button seven out of ten times.
And Andrew Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, told The New York Times that the rat, “would have done so five out of 10 times by chance.”