From Kerala to France: Brainwaves emailed

Here's a story that sounds like science fiction but actually happened. A man in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, thought the words `hola' and `ciao' (hello or goodbye in Italian) and another man in Strasbourg, France, received the two greetings in his brain. No hands, no speaking, no typing, no gestures -just mind-tomind communication.
Researchers from the University of Barcelona, Harvard Medical School and three companies making brain stimulation equipment and robotics, carried out these experiments in March and April this year.Their findings are detailed in a paper published last week in the online journal PLOS-ONE.
This is how it worked. The person in Kerala was connected to a wearable EEG system plugged into a laptop. An EEG (electro-encephalograph) measures tiny electric currents in the brain. To do so, small electrodes are put on the scalp, much like wearing a tight cap. This set up is called the Brain Computer Interface (BCI).
“Setting up the BCI system is very easy and can be set up anywhere,“ Giulio Ruffini, lead researcher and CEO of Starlabs, Barcelona, said.After training in imagining certain movements that are associated with specific words, the sender thinks `hola' or `ciao'. This gets translated into an electronic signal that is sent through the internet to Strasbourg, nearly 8,000 kilometres away .
In Strasbourg, another person is wearing the reverse system in which electronic signals are transmitted to the brain from a machine. The electronic `hola' and `ciao' get translated back and flash in the receiver's brain. So, how did our man in Kerala figure in all this? The company Neuroelectrics that supplied the BCI has a representative there and they thought a distant location would be good “to show that distance was irrelevant“. A similar experiment was done between Barcelona and Strasbourg with similar results.
Last year, scientists at Harvard had made a rat's tail twitch while its brain was connected electronically to a man who merely thought it. In August, scientists at the University of Washington established the first human brain-to-brain interface when a man moved another man's hand simply by thinking about it.Both were connected electronically .
The Kerala-France experiment is the first time that communication of words has been accomplished. The experiment is still rudimentary and requires training for the sender. Ruffini said that the Kerala man had to concentrate so hard that he needed breaks to relax. The system is still a far cry from seamless telepathic communication often seen in sci-fi movies.But it's a big step forward.