One afternoon in the 1980s a small boy sat in a house in Hyderabad in southern India watching television. There wasn’t much on but one show had captured his attention. It was Star Trek, and on that particular afternoon, Dr Spock was bent over a prostrate man. The man was an intruder on the Starship Enterprise trying to warn the crew of danger, but whenever he tried to speak he writhed in pain. Spock puts his hands on the man’s temples and says, in a mesmerising voice, “Open your mind. We move together, our minds sharing the same thoughts.” This was, as any Trekkie will know, the Vulcan “mind meld”, which Spock used to seamlessly access the man’s thoughts and learn of a dangerous machine.
That little boy was exceptionally bright, won a scholarship to study in the US and is now co-director of the Centre for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington. His name is Rajesh Rao and he’s had a fixation on the mind meld ever since, because he thinks if we could invent something just like it we might solve a fundamental problem with the design of humans.
“Language is the main modality of communication and we have to use our body to express our thoughts,” says Rao. “So speech is all about controlling your vocal cords and your tongue, using muscle control. Same thing with writing. You have to use your hands to write or type. Brain to brain communication would be eliminating that bottleneck.” That’s right: in Rao’s world not being able to get thoughts straight from your own mind into someone else’s is a handicap. If we could only bypass the clunkiness of talk and text, all manner of things might be possible. Let’s say you’ve got a brilliant mathematics professor whose teaching sucks – wouldn’t it be great if you could just transfer the calculus from their brain into yours?
Rao is one of a handful of scientists working on a brain-to-brain interface to solve this very problem. It is a challenge right on the limit of our understanding
