The research study, conducted at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and published in Nature, saw the motor portions of the rat's brains using a brain-to-brain interface.
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A pair of rats
As a result, the rodents could pass messages between each other. One "encoder" rat performed actions which were then transferred by the interface and replicated by the second "decoder" rat.
Researcher Miguel Nicolelis said: "The present study demonstrates for the first time that tactile and motor information, extracted in real time from simultaneously-recorded populations of cortical neurons from a rat's brain, can be transmitted directly into another subject's cortex through the utilization of a real-time BTBI."
This could lead the way for organic brain supercomputers, it has been suggested.
Nicolelis added: "Future works will elucidate in detail the characteristics of this multi-brain system, its computational capabilities, and how it compares to other non-Turing computational architectures."
