Remember in The Matrix how the robots connected everybody into one giant computer network and then fed off energy emitted by their human batteries? Scientists have just gotten a little bit closer to making that nightmare a reality by connecting two lab rat brains together over the Internet. Now's the perfect time to launch that rat porn website you've been talking about!
"These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication linkage between brains," scientist Miguel Nicolelis explained in a statement. "Basically, we are creating what I call an organic computer." Organic computer? Or first nail in the coffin for the human race?
In a writeup of the research, the Guardian describes how one recent set of brain-networking experiments went down:
The scientists first demonstrated that rats can share, and act on, each other's sensory information by electrically connecting their brains via tiny grids of electrodes that reach into the motor cortex, the brain region that processes movement.
The rats were trained to press a lever when a light went on above it. When they performed the task correctly, they got a drink of water. To test the animals' ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light that came on above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rat's brain. In trials, the second rat responded correctly to the imported brain signals 70% of the time by pressing the lever.
Remarkably, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the receiving rat failed at the task, the first rat was not rewarded with a drink, and appeared to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner. In further experiments, the rats collaborated in a task that required them to distinguish between narrow and wide openings using their whiskers.
In the final test, the scientists connected rats on different continents and beamed their brain activity back and forth over the internet. "Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate," said Miguel Pais-Vieira, the first author of the study, in a statement. "This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations."
And is if the idea of a pair of rats combining their brains on the Internet wasn't scary enough for you, Nicolelis and his team are now working on ways to link "several animals' brains at once to solve more complex tasks." Which sounds an awful lot like they are making a proto-Borg to us. It is bad enough that New York has so many rats out there already, can you imagine if they all were connected into a giant collective intelligence? This will not end well! There is still time to resist!
