A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information

TLDR

The study uses a brain‑to‑brain interface in which an encoder rat performs sensorimotor tasks selecting between tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a decoder rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar selections based only on the encoder rat’s brain activity, showing that the coupled brains form a complex system capable of exchanging, processing, and storing information, and indicating that BTBIs could enable brain networks to interact and support biological computing.

Abstract

A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an “encoder” rat performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a “decoder” rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the encoder rat's brain. These results demonstrated that a complex system was formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process and store information and, hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and for biological computing devices.