UW Researchers Develop Real Mind Reading Over The Internet

You can read just about anything on the internet from the marvelous to the mundane and now even minds!  Researchers at the University of Washington say they’ve successfully linked up the brains of two different individuals --who were at different locations from one another-- so that one person could figure out a very simple “yes or no” message that the other person was thinking.Volunteers took part in a “20-questions” style of game. One person thought of an object drawn from a specific category, like thinking of a dog from a list of animals. The other volunteer, a mile away,  then sent online chat messages that asked “yes-or-no” questions to get clues about what the object was. But the volunteer who was thinking about the animal could only think “yes” or “no” back to his/her counterpart.

After 20 rounds, volunteers “were able to correctly identify the objects more than 70 percent of the time” and they correctly understood the “yes” or “no” signals 93 percent of the time."

U.S. News & World Report  say the researchers say they hope to one day facilitate direct brain-to-brain interaction, while cutting out the Internet “middle-man.”