Watch CNN’s Reenactment of “Brain-to-Brain” Communication

I-LABSMedia Coverage, Research

Above: CNN’s Nick Glass interviews Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor at I-LABS and in the UW department of psychology.

A UK-based reporting team from CNN International came to Seattle this fall to film the “brain-to-brain” experiment, a collaboration between I-LABS’ Andrea Stocco and Chantel Prat and UW Computer Science and Engineering’s Rajesh Rao.

The nearly 5-minute segment reenacts the research team’s recently published experiment demonstrating how information can be passed between two human brains allowing individuals to play the game “20 questions” without using words.

In the video, CNN’s Nick Glass is the “respondent” who answers yes or no questions displayed on a screen just by focusing on light on the left or right side, indicating a “yes” or “no” response. The information is sent via the internet to the “inquirer,” a researcher in Stocco and Prat’s lab, who sees a slight pulse of light if the answer is “yes.” The two go back and forth a few times, and then the inquirer can guess what object the respondent is thinking of.

Glass, who did the segment as part of CNN’s “Make Create Innovate” series, described it as “dipping our toes in the water” into the possibilities of linking human brains.

The technology has potential uses in medicine, education and other fields, as explained by Rao at the end of the segment.

The work is based on the team’s initial 2013 demonstration of how motor information can be transferred from one brain to the other.

“I am the first person in the world to receive a tiny piece of information to come straight from another person’s brain,” Stocco told CNN of that 2013 experiment.

CNN International reaches 293 million households around the globe. The “brain-to-brain” originally aired Nov. 21 with additional airings planned through the end of the month.

Watch the segment on CNN’s website.