Networked minds

I'm all for scientific advances, but sometimes I read things that are just plain scary.

This week's installment of "You Do See How Badly This Could Go Wrong, Don't You?" comes to us courtesy of a team led by Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscience researcher at Duke University.  Rahwan, Nicolelis, and their team have achieved something pretty spectacular -- they have hooked together the brains of four rats via a computer interface, and demonstrated that the conjoined brains could learn (quickly) how to team up and work collaboratively.

In other words, the four minds were pooling resources and working as a unit.

They did the same thing with two monkeys, linking them via a computer interface hooked to a robotic arm.  The trick was, one monkey could only move the arm vertically, and the other only horizontally, so they had to learn to work together to accomplish a task and get a reward.

"They synchronise their brains and they achieve the task by creating a superbrain – a structure that is the combination of three brains," Nicolelis said.  "We send a message to the brains, the brains incorporate that message, and we can retrieve the message later."

Nicolelis calls this linked group of brains a "brainet."

Other scientists were quick to point out that what Nicolelis and his group had accomplished was similar to parallel processing by computer systems.  "In order to synchronise, the brains are responding to each other," said Iyad Rahwan, computer scientist at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi.  "So you end up with an input, some kind of computation, and an output – what a computer does."

Andrea Stocco, researcher in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, was impressed by what Nicolelis and his team had done.  "This is incredible," Stocco said.  "We are sampling different neurons from different animals and putting them together to create a super organism....  Once brains are connected, applications become just a matter of what different animals can do.  We can expect a great deal more from human minds connected in this way...  Sometimes it’s really hard to collaborate if you are a mathematician and you’re thinking about very complex and abstract objects.  If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal."

Which all sounds great, until you start considering the possible ways this could go wrong.  Maybe I'm a pessimist, but my first thought wasn't about transmitting my abstruse mathematical arguments to another person -- it was about loss of privacy, and (worse) the potential for one person to control another.  If it becomes possible to link two human minds together, what's to stop one of them from manipulating the other, unwittingly or deliberately?

My feeling is that once that link is established, the two minds thus conjoined would never be the same again -- even after the link was severed.

It's why I've always thought that of all the alleged psychic phenomena out there, telepathy has to be the scariest.  Think about it: would you really want someone to have access to your thoughts?  I'm pretty sure that the chaotic, bizarre, and sometimes not very nice thoughts that come to my mind aren't that far out of the norm, but I still would prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much.

But what about the potential for speeding up information transfer?  I still remember when I saw the movie The Matrix the first time, how much I wanted one of those portals in the back of my skull.  You know, just stick a USB cable up there, and click "Download Japanese," and voilà, I'm fluent.  It'd sure be nice to gain knowledge that way, rather than by the hard work of memorization, study, and figuring things out, however it would put us teachers out of a job.

But once you become able to put stuff into brains -- whether downloaded from a computer, or accessed from another person's mind -- there arises the trenchant question of who gets to decide what information goes where.  How do you assure that what is being passed to you is true?  When we learn, the slow, painstaking way, each of our brains not only acts as a sponge, it acts as a filter.  We consider what we're learning, ask questions, make judgments.  If we're being fed information through a computer interface, at what point in the transfer process do we get to ask, "Does this make sense?"

Don't get me wrong.  I don't think these ethical questions should halt the research Nicolelis and his group are doing, and I don't mean to denigrate his accomplishment.  But as tempting as it is to rush headlong into linking up human minds into a "superorganism" or "brainet," I'm certainly not going to be the first one to volunteer.

Call me suspicious, but the only one I want in control of what I'm thinking is myself.

The case of the telepathic mice

One area in which a lot of people could use some work is in how to draw logical connections.

It's not that it's necessarily that simple.  Given a lot of facts, the question, "Now what does this all mean?" can be decidedly non-trivial.  After all, if it were trivial, there would be only one political party, and the only job we skeptics would have would be uncovering what the facts actually are.  The deductive work, the drawing of a conclusion, would be quick and unanimous, and Washington DC would be a decidedly more congenial place.

To take a rather simpler example, let's look at the following picture, that's been making the rounds of the social network lately:

Even ignoring the rather dubious religious aspect, this seems to me to be a rather ridiculous conclusion.  Just because these foods vaguely resemble a human organ (really vaguely, in the case of the tomato and the heart), is their supposed beneficial effect on that organ why they look that way?  It doesn't take a rocket scientist, nor a botanist, to find a dozen counter-examples, of plants that look like a human organ, but which have no beneficial effects on that organ whatsoever.  (This whole idea goes back to medieval times, when it was known as the "Doctrine of Similars."  It's why so many plants' names end in "-wort" -- wyrt was Old English for "plant," and the doctors of that time, whom we must hope had their malpractice insurance paid up, used lungwort, liverwort, spleenwort, and the rest to try to cure their patients.  No wonder the life expectancy back then was so low.)

On the other hand, Amanita mushrooms look a little like a penis, and if you eat one, you're fucked.  So maybe there's something to this after all.

In any case, let's move on to something a little trickier -- last week's story of the telepathic mice.

Miguel Nicolelis, of Duke University, announced last week that he'd been able to accomplish something that no one had done -- to create a device that allowed the electrical firings in one brain (in this case, a mouse) to be beamed to another brain, influencing that brain's firing.  In his paper, released in Nature, Nicolelis and his team describe engineering microelectrodes that were then implanted in the primary motor cortex of mouse #1.  These electrodes are capable of detecting the neural firing pattern in the mouse's brain -- specifically, to determine which of a pair of levers the mouse selected to pull.  A second mouse has a different set of implants -- one which stimulate neurons.  If mouse #1 pulls the right hand lever, and mouse #2 does, too, they both get a treat.  They can't see each other -- but the electrodes in the brain of mouse #1 sends a signal, via the electrode array, to the electrodes in the brain of mouse #2, stimulating it to choose the correct lever.

Direct, brain-to-brain communication.  Obvious application to medicine... and the military.  But my problem is how it's been described in popular media.  Everyone's calling it "telepathy" -- making a number of psychic websites erupt in excited backslapping, claiming that this "scientifically proves telepathy to be real."  "They just showed what we've been claiming for decades," one thrilled woo-woo stated.

The problem is -- is this actually telepathy?  Well, in one limited sense, yes; the word, after all, comes from the Greek tele (distant) + pathéia (feeling).  So, yes, the mice were able to feel, or at least communicate, at a distance.  But remember that the only reason it worked was that both the encoder and the decoder mouse had electrode arrays stuck into their brains.  There's an understood mechanism at work here; Nicolelis knows exactly how the signal from mouse #1 got to mouse #2 and stimulated its brain to perform the task correctly.  This is in exact opposition to the usual claims of telepathy -- that somehow (no mechanism specified) one human brain can pick up information from another, sometimes over great distances.  Complex information, too; not just enough to know which lever to choose, but whole conversations, visual images, sounds, and emotions.

Oh, and some people think they can get into telepathic contact with their pets.  Which adds a whole new level of craziness to the claim.

So, actually, what Nicolelis got his mice to do isn't telepathy at all, at least not in the usual sense of the word.  But on a surface read, it would be easy to miss the difference, to see why (in fact) his experiment makes the claims of the telepaths less likely, not more.  If it takes fancy arrays of electrodes to allow the transmission of even the simplest of information, how on earth could two brains communicate far more complex information, without any help at all?  Add that to the fact that there has not been a single experiment that has conclusively demonstrated that telepathy, as advertised, actually exists (for an excellent, and unbiased, overview of the history of telepathy experiments, go here).  It seems very likely, just based on the evidence, that telepathy doesn't exist -- not between Nicolelis' mice, and certainly not between humans.

Just as well, really.  I'd really rather people not read my mind.  For one thing, my brain can be a little... distractible:

Most days, reading my mind would be the telepathic equivalent of riding the Tilt-o-Whirl.  So probably better that my thoughts remain where they are, bouncing randomly off the inside of my skull as usual.