Flagging interesting research: In collective intelligence of ‘Brainets’, germ of an ‘organic computer’

The experiments challenged the belief that minds ultimately belonged to individuals, each of whom acted individually, delinked from the minds of other individuals. In the Star Trek series, the villain, Borg, is a collection of cyborgs with a group or ‘hive’ mind known as the “Collective”.

In the first experiment, the brains of three rhesus macaque monkeys were wired together in a “Brainet” — a functional network of animal brains — so they were able to collectively control the movements of a virtual avatar arm in 3D to reach a target.

In the second experiment, the brains of four rats were joined, allowing them to collaborate to perform a variety of computational operations, including pattern recognition, storage and retrieval of sensory information and even weather forecasting.

Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke scientist who led the work on both experiments, told the Guardian: “Essentially, we created a super brain. A collective brain created from three monkey brains. Nobody has ever done that.”

The fact that “groups of animals were able to literally merge their collective brain activity together [in a ‘monkey Brainet’ and a ‘rat Brainet’]… suggests that animal Brainets could serve as the core of organic computers that employ a hybrid digital-analog computational architecture”, Nicolelis has written on his web site.

“Traditionally, brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) extract motor commands from a single brain to control the movements of artificial devices,” the authors have written in the abstract to the ‘monkey’ paper. The Brainet utilised “very-large-scale brain activity from two or three nonhuman primates to engage in a common motor behaviour…

“With long-term training we observed increased coordination of behaviour, increased correlations in neuronal activity between different brains, and modifications to neuronal representation of the motor plan. Overall, performance of the Brainet improved owing to collective monkey behaviour. These results suggest that primate brains can be integrated into a Brainet, which self-adapts to achieve a common motor goal.”

In the second experiment, a Brainet was built by interconnecting four adult rat brains through the implantation of multi-electrode arrays, placed bilaterally in the primary somatosensory cortex. The implants were used to record neural ensemble electrical activity, and transmit virtual tactile information via intracortical electrical microstimulation (ICMS). Once the animals had recovered from the implantation surgery, they were tested in a range of tasks, and were found to consistently perform at the same or higher levels than single rats.

However, despite the exciting possibilities thrown up by the experiments, the replication of Brainets in humans seems difficult to conceive of — now, or later. Neural privacy is important to humans, and brain-to-brain interfaces may not be sensible or practical, scientists have cautioned.
— ADAPTED FROM ABSTRACTS TO STUDIES, NICOLESIS’S web site