Brain to Brain Interaction (BBI)

Technonauka świetnie wykorzystuje nasze pragnienie ciągłego udoskonalania się i pracuje nad coraz większym usprawnieniem człowieka. Literatura science fiction od lat pełna była bohaterów cyborgów, lecz naukowcy nie mogli za nią nadążyć. Dziś jednak fantastyka coraz dynamicznej przeistacza się w rzeczywistość, a nowoczesne technologie wkraczają nie tylko w życie wojska, ale również w naszą codzienność.

Mimowolne cyborgi Łukasza Kamieńskiego to fascynująca wyprawa do świata ludzi-maszyn i najnowszych osiągnięć nauki. Sięgając po twarde dane z zakresu technologii i bioinżynierii oraz odwołując się do popkultury, Kamieński opisuje długą drogę od superwojownika Achillesa do dystopijnych wizji niedalekiej przyszłości. Próbuje też odpowiedzieć na najbardziej palące pytania – jak wiele ulepszeń przyjmą ciało i umysł? Czy natura sama określi granicę, po której przekroczeniu pojawią się niemożliwe do przewidzenia skutki uboczne? A może przeciwnie – ciało zacznie się dostosowywać do ingerencji, aż do momentu pełnej technoewolucji?

Człowiek od wieków próbował poprawiać swoje zdolności i wykorzystywał najnowsze osiągnięcia techniki. Od teleskopu po mikroskop, od okularów po noktowizor, od kompasu po GPS. Czas na kolejną ewolucję. Od człowieka do cyborga.

Homeothermic animals (birds and mammals) are prime model systems for investigating the developmental plasticity and neural mechanisms of vocal duetting, a cooperative acoustic signal that prevails in family-living and pair-bonded species including humans. This review focuses on the nature of this trait and its nurturing during ontogeny and extending into adulthood. I begin by outlining the underpinning concepts of duet codes and pair-specific answering rules as used by birds to develop their learned coordinated song, driven by a complex interaction between self-generated and socially mediated auditory feedback. The more tractable avian model of duetting helps identify research gaps in singing primates that also use duetting as a type of intraspecific vocal interaction. Nevertheless, it has become clear that primate coordinated song-whether overlapping or antiphonal-is subject to some degree of vocal flexibility. This is reflected in the ability of lesser apes, titi monkeys, tarsiers, and lemurs to adjust the structure and timing of their calls through (1) social influence, (2) coordinated duetting both before and after mating, (3) the repair of vocal mistakes, (4) the production of heterosexual song early in life, (5) vocal accommodation in call rhythm, (6) conditioning, and (7) innovation. Furthermore, experimental work on the neural underpinnings of avian and mammalian antiphonal duets point to a hierarchical (cortico-subcortical) control mechanism that regulates, via inhibition, the temporal segregation of rapid vocal exchanges. I discuss some weaknesses in this growing field of research and highlight prospective avenues for future investigation.

A major function of the human brain is to mediate interactions with other people. Until recently, studying social interactions as they occur within the brain was not possible due to the lack of measurable methods to observe two interacting minds simultaneously. We have developed a novel MRI dual-head volume coil pair that can scan two subjects' brains simultaneously while the subjects are socially interacting in one MRI scanner. The feasibility of using this coil for dyadic functional MRI (fMRI) study has been successfully demonstrated for the first time. Meanwhile, an innovative robust scheme for decoupling two circular-polarized coils (not surface coils) is introduced in theory and validated in practice in the coil technology development.

The bulk of social neuroscience takes a ‘stimulus-brain’ approach, typically comparing brain responses to different types of social stimuli, but most of the time in the absence of direct social interaction. Over the last two decades, a growing number of researchers have adopted a ‘brain-to-brain’ approach, exploring similarities between brain patterns across participants as a novel way to gain insight into the social brain. This methodological shift has facilitated the introduction of naturalistic social stimuli into the study design (e.g., movies), and, crucially, has spurred the development of new tools to directly study social interaction, both in controlled experimental settings and in more ecologically valid environments. Specifically, hyperscanning setups, which allow the simultaneous recording of brain activity from two or more individuals during social tasks has gained popularity in recent years. However, currently there is no agreed-upon approach to carry out such inter-brain connectivity analysis, resulting in a scattered landscape of analysis techniques. To accommodate a growing demand to standardize analysis approaches in this fast-growing research field, we have developed HyPyP, a comprehensive and easy open-source software package that allows (social) neuroscientists to carry-out and to interpret inter-brain connectivity analyses.

Discuss this article (3) Comments 2 1 RESEARCH ARTICLE Brain-to-Brain (mind-to-mind) interaction at distance: a confirmatory study [v3; ref status: approved 1, not approved 1, http://f1000r.es/4ka] Abstract This study reports the results of a confirmatory experiment testing the hypothesis that it is possible to detect coincidences of a sequence of events (silence-signal) of different length, by analyzing the EEG activity of two human partners spatially separated when one member of the pair receives the stimulation and the second one is connected only mentally with the first. Seven selected participants with a long friendship and a capacity to maintain focused mental concentration, were divided into two groups located in two different laboratories approximately 190 km apart. Each participant acted both as a "stimulated" and as a "mentally connected" member of the pair for a total of twenty sessions overall. The offline analysis of EEG activity using a special classification algorithm based on a support vector machine, detected the coincidences in the sequence of events of the stimulation protocol between the EEG activity of the "stimulated" and the "mentally connected" pairs. Furthermore the correlation of the power spectra of the five EEG frequency bands between each of the twenty pairs of data was analyzed using a bootstrap procedure. The overall percentage of coincidences out of 88 events was 78.4% and the statistically significant average correlations between the EEG alpha and gamma bands among the pairs of participants, confirmed the results observed in a pilot study. The examination of potential internal, external and statistical artifacts which might have caused these results, ruled out external and internal artifacts. However, the examination of potential statistical artifacts revealed a good level of coincidences in only four pairs using a new procedure to detect the sequences of silence and signal between the EEG activity of the pairs of participants, giving a mild support to the hypothesis that two brains and hence two minds can be connected at distance.