Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed.

Now it sounds curious why it can't leap wirelessly from one brain to another one this way.

View on HN

I've already tested this 6 years ago with a friend. We had this idea that it could be possible by putting our skulls close together. We've tried a variety of techniques from thinking about a specific number from 1-10, one of us visualizing the answer as hard as he could, the other one waiting passively for the answer to 'occur to him'. After making sth like 100 tries and writing down our answers - the results were negative, same as for pure chance. Then we've realized that maybe abstract information cannot be sent this way so we agreed on just two messages - very happy vs really sad, where we would imagine extreme emotions. Obtained the same negative results.

Being only slightly less skeptic than is popularly considered reasonable (or more skeptic - skeptic about skepticism itself too) I'd say your conclusion is not strictly valid. Perhaps you were doing it wrong. Like people who can't swim are doing it wrong until they get it. Or perhaps ice skating can make a better example. Imagine you have never ever used you hand and don't remember how to - can you expect it to start moving the way you want just by imagining the motion (you probably are aware of the difference between inner experiences taking place when imagining your hand moving and when actually moving it already) and waiting it to occur?

There is a Ukrainian psychotechnologist Oleg Bakhtiyarov[1] who has written (in a fairly scientific manner) a book titled "active consciousness" (only available in Russian unfortunately as well as a number of his lectures on YouTube) on how to develop mind functions most of the people don't know they have. I (as well as many other people, mostly those practicing freediving) have successfully mastered some of the techniques he teaches and can this way guarantee his job is far from being pure science fiction, I have not came far enough to develop telepathic skills though (yet I believe those interested in trying should probably go this way).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Bakhtiyarov

You're point is valid, yet I still find it very unlikely. At some point after numerous tries you might even start fooling yourself (and others). I'll give the guy a chance though.

Whatever mechanism that can send electrical signals wirelessly doesn't necessarily map to big concepts like numbers, words, or emotions. Whatever the effect, if it exists, is not necessarily observable just by examining consciousness. It might be observable in other ways, like electrodes.

I think that the effect works over very small distances, also there are two skulls in the way.

So, you're saying we need to slice open a couple skulls and put them side to side to have "thought" transfer? :) That sounds like a good movie plot.

Well.... I have no idea! But I think that there's a big difference between thought transfer and creating physical interactions between brains or between a brain and a machine (for example I think it's well known that if you zap brains with big pulses of magnetism then there are observed impacts) or between a machine or another brain and a part of a brain. I think that actually it would be more like transferring a skin irritation rather than a thought. But lets go with the movie plot...

Also, maybe there are more profound ways of doing the interfacing! If we really want to get Dr. Evil about it, could you use transplant technology to conjoin people and then integrate their brains to invade and manipulate their minds? I wonder what the psychology of a mind made from two minds would be like (ok, I'm guessing that the torture , shock, fear and anguish of the process would mean that the resulting singular personality would be singularly crazy, but leave that aside...) could you make a "greater" or usefully different mind through this process?

Hell - why stop with two?! Why not run a program where you deliberately create seed minds by exposing children to different kinds of experiences and then integrating them to create novel kinds of thinkers!

To earn full Crazy Nazi badges you could then go on to bring animal minds into the equation - what happens if you add a chimp or a wolf into a shared brain structure?

Ok - just to be clear, anyone who does this should be executed, but I think that the idea could make a pretty decent Netflix mini series :)

ah, you may enjoy "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge :)

I've read both! A long time ago for aFUtD but Deepness just last year. I'd forgotten the group mind Tines beings in aFUtD but just looked them up on wikipedia. I've recently been re-reading Iain M. Banks and the minds in his culture series are referred to as having group minds.

>Now it sounds curious why it can't leap wirelessly from one brain to another one this way.

What do you think you're doing when you write?

(I'm only half-joking)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com