If you could eschew the telephone, and instead wear a cap that allowed you to share your thoughts with someone else, very far away, would you? The University of Washington has used this kind of brain-to-brain interference with a “mind control” experiment where a scientists “transmitted” his thoughts to a partner while they played a video game.

Brain scientists at the University of Washington have used an old-fashioned parlour game in a novel way to prove that two people’s brains can be linked across the Internet – an experiment that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a science-fiction novel.

The experiments were carried out in dark labs almost a mile apart and involved five different pairs of participants. One participant, or “respondent”, wore a cap connected to an electroencephalography machine that records electrical brain activity, and was shown an object, for example, a dog, on a computer screen.

‘It uses conscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually and it requires two people to collaborate’.

Stocco said the success of the experiment took researchers by surprise. The “yes” answer generated a response intense enough to stimulate the visual cortex and cause the other person’s brain to see a flash of light. Through answers to these simple “yes” or “no” questions, the inquirer identified the correct item.

Thankfully, while it’s hailed as a “mind reading” link, the demonstration only lets people transmit a binary yes-or-no, with the university’s Andrea Stocco connecting volunteers to play a question-and-answer game over their brain-to-brain connection.

The respondent answered “yes” or “no” to each question by focusing on one of two flashing LED lights attached to the monitor, which flashed at different frequencies. The 10 participants could guess the correct object in 72 percent of games with the device compared to just 18 percent of the control games, according to the study.

There were several reasons for the incorrect guesses in the real games, the most likely of which was interpreting the phosphene as something not seen with the eyes, but the brain. The researchers emphasize that their experiment demonstrated the possibility of real-time brain-to-brain communications in a cooperative task, in which the inquirer and respondent must exchange information bi-directionally and in real-time to collaboratively solve the task.

The team is also looking at a way to transmit brain states, like sending signals from an alert person to a sleepy one, or from a focused person to one with ADHD. “When the non-ADHD student is paying attention, the ADHD student’s brain gets put into a state of greater attention automatically”.

Virginia de Sa, associate professor of cognitive science and member of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center at University of California, San Diego, said the study was interesting because it had a closed loop of information going from one participant to another.

“Evolution has spent a colossal amount of time to find ways for us and other animals to take information out of our brains and communicate it to other animals in the forms of behavior, speech and so on”, Stocco said in a statement. “While the flashing lights are signals that we’re putting into the brain, those parts of the brain are doing a million other things at any given time too”, she said.

The brain game is described in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE.