You know something? The phrase “I don’t give a rat’s ass” might not be too accurate, considering how the rear end of a rat has a tail hanging from it, but in the near future, we might soon see a variant of that particular phrase appear. In fact, Harvard researchers have recently published in PLOS ONE that they were running experiments to study and evaluate the effectiveness of transcranial focused ultrasound being used to trigger specific actions in an animal.
In order to achieve their goal, they placed an anesthetized rat in the lab, where an ultrasound device was carefully positioned over its scalp, with a human subject wearing an EEG cap which was hooked up to said ultrasound. It takes some time to fine tune the situation, but once successful, it functioned as a brain-to-brain interface, allowing the human being to actually move the rat’s tail using telepathy. Of course, the practical applications of this particular research remain rather limited for obvious reasons as this point in time, but could we be looking at a highly advanced model in the future, where we telepathically control a rat to infiltrate a building, acting as a “spy” for us?
Filed in . Read more about Brain.