I do not think it shows anything new. It combines recording signature of imaginary movements which was known for some time with TMS brain stimulation to evoke visual effects which is also well researched in recent years. The rest is just communication technology. It does not have any practical application because for able body people there much better means of communication with higher throughput(language movements etc...) The 'sender' setup might be usefull for paralized persons but the method of receiving is rather awkward and I would not call it noninvasive. The brain is subjected to strong enough field to evoke abnormal reaction in brain. It is more invasive than for example using tactile stimulus on plm of the hand or something similar. So the only gain is for authors to make a claim of brain-to-brain communication.

Similarly you could use measurements form muscles on one person in India and transmit it  to another person in US with tactile stimulation. Asking for relaxing or contracting muscle you could transmit ciao and hello. But  muscle-to-muscle  or leg-to-leg communication does not sound as good as brain-to-brain, is it?

I do not think it shows anything new. It combines recording signature of imaginary movements which was known for some time with TMS brain stimulation to evoke visual effects which is also well researched in recent years. The rest is just communication technology. It does not have any practical application because for able body people there much better means of communication with higher throughput(language movements etc...) The 'sender' setup might be usefull for paralized persons but the method of receiving is rather awkward and I would not call it noninvasive. The brain is subjected to strong enough field to evoke abnormal reaction in brain. It is more invasive than for example using tactile stimulus on plm of the hand or something similar. So the only gain is for authors to make a claim of brain-to-brain communication.

Similarly you could use measurements form muscles on one person in India and transmit it  to another person in US with tactile stimulation. Asking for relaxing or contracting muscle you could transmit ciao and hello. But  muscle-to-muscle  or leg-to-leg communication does not sound as good as brain-to-brain, is it?

Somewhere along my neuroscience education, I was introduced to the idea that only what is finally expressed as a motor or visceral output has a meaningful consequence, I believe as an extension of Sherrington’s “final common path” concept, although the idea that consciousness has no direct leverage in the world seems to have been around longer. To me, the recent demonstration of brain-to-brain communication showed that what may not be the final neural decision can be made to have consequences, which seems to imply a greater social significance than a scientific one.

I'm with Piotr on this one.  We're using known material particulars and applying clever engineering to make them contribute to other known material particulars. It's a big machine that doesn't answer any fundamental questions about who or what is steering. Choosing to focus on (er...glamourize) the brain is not a replacement for making a novel, theoretically informative point about the brain's relationship to the rest of the world before you put the right wires next to it.

The goal of non-invasive brain-to-brain interfacing was not to make theoretical advances, but to create a platform that would push forward and permit future advances. Let me explain. We have now a lot of knowledge of signature brain activity that corresponds to certain mental states (motor imagery is a perfect example).  This research is correlational in nature; it does not guarantee that the signals that are being identified (the"features", in BCI lingo) are directly related to the brain's way of encoding a particular type of information---it only implies that the two are correlated. If you want to directly encode information at a neural level, however, you need to have a more precise idea of how this information is encoded. You can "read" from the brain as long as you have a reliable feature, but you can "write" well only when you know the code. For this reason, brain-to-brain technology will likely provide a fantastic way to test specific theories of how knowledge in higher-level associated areas is encoded (there are many theories and specualtions, but very few ways to test them). Certainly, the current technological means are limited; TMS and tCS are clunky and spatially limited, but other technologies are already on the horizon, like Focused Ultrasound, which combines great spatial resolution with the ability of reaching subcortical regions. In summary, I agree that the two existing Brain-to-brain demonstration do not provide new theoretical insights. BUT they were not meant to do that, only to open up new possibilities and new technologies for research. Only the future will tell us whether they are a useful idea or a dead end.

First, the method to interface TMS with EEG  demonstrates beyond doubt that in the brain information can be consciously " read" (decoded), written" (encoded) and transferred using electromagnetic spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroelectrodynamics (NED), meaningful information can be electrically inferred at the network level.

Initially, we based our theoretical model on non-stereotyped action potentials. In the academic environment the theory was received with skepticism . Only later we realized that they tried to preserve mathematical theory of temporal coding (stereotyped spikes) and classical “connectivity”. In fact it was a concerted effort in neuroscience to hide any information regarding non-stereotyped spikes and to preserve the dogma.  Once temporal coding theory was combined with  classical “connectivity” there is no place for any effect from  electric fields, computational neuroscience developed a mathematical model of spherical chickens in a vacuum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StHMKdvuHN0

Second, one should agree that in this case without such contribution exerted by the electromagnetic field a conscious noninvasive brain-to-brain communication cannot be explained -it is not like one puts wires  between  neurons and muscles aka connectivity in the brain the electric field has a more subtle role.

Third, ciao and hello cannot be interpreted by  a contracting muscle. One needs a brain to get the semantics of those two words

Interestingly , it is not an academic laboratory that proved NED. Certainly I do not feel  at all that  their entire endeavor is  a dead end.

Dear Dorian, do you think meaning patterns (see Freeman´s concept of meaning) could be transmited to the second brain by means of distributed (multielectrode) direct electric stimulation producing AM waves, instead of transcranial magnetic stimulaton?

So, the issue of interpreting and reading comes up against some fairly large concerns beyond the scope of this thread.  I'll try, though:

Predicating meaning on the presence/function of a brain is a comfortable move, but it reflects anthropocentric biases that are elsewhere holding science from making potentially helpful connections between "special" biological functions and generic physical principles.

Reading and writing and interpreting are thoroughly arbitrary functions. You can either get the signal read to do an altogether different thing than was intended. Just the same way that the letters I'm typing now are expressions of my brain (and let's hope, other parts of me too!), some person or some function between you and me has the power to rearrange the letters into an irrelevant comment (maybe you think that such is the case as it is!). The lovely thing about language is that it is arbitrary and, so, as a consequence, permitting of any transpositions and transformations that (insensitive to meaning) can produce new meaning. This, I thought is why it was a good metaphor for the transportability of knowledge/thought/stimulus experiences from one domain to another. The problem with this is that the transportability and manipulability of the signal is no guarantee of the "message"'s intrinsic meaning. Meaning is always in the use or in the grounding, and I think that NED is only finding one way to manipulate and make use of a signal that has many consequences and causes at many time scales. To suggest that current brain activation can have a single entailment than can be read finitely and executed is to miss some of the mystery and texture that is there for bioloigcal and behavioral scientists to probe.

Best wishes,

Damian

Absolutely,  if  such electrodes are implanted in a specific area  in the brain, the amplitude modulation can send meaningful patterns as Freeman predicted. However, since the electric field penetrates the tissue brains do process  information intensively not in a digital manner as  computers http://neuroelectrodynamics.blogspot.com/p/computing-by-interaction.html 

The biggest problem is the theoretical model.Always,a consistent theory shows the path and new things can be predicted  (see Higgs theory in physics)  

The theory influences  everything even the way we collect and process the data  - e.g stereotyped action potentials vs non-stereotyped AP cannot be observed in single electrode recordings.

My feeling is that repeating the same experimental setup (single electrodes, stereotyped spikes ) cannot probe anything new except old theoretical models which  have provided a mixture of postdictions.

Very interesting exchange!  These experiments seem to establish that  functional -relational invariants -- probabilistic patterns of activation in the cortex -- embody meaning  by themselves and can be transmitted. But to talk of meaning of a message we should know  how the researchers confirmed that  "transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to deliver the message to the brains of the receivers".   Which is the criterion to decide that the same meaning (same semantic functional invariant) was maintained by sender and by receiver? Without clarifying the meaning of the message and its invariance across the transmission it is difficult to interpret results. Can you give us the source of this published paper? And can you explain how the issue of tinvariance in this semantic referent i of the message is appraised?

Details are presented in

Grau, C., Ginhoux, R., Riera, A., Nguyen, T. L., Chauvat, H., Berg, M., ... & Ruffini, G. (2014). Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies. PloS one, 9(8), e105225.

already included the link

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0105225

Also  other details, a related  topic  Place cells - What_does_it_prove?

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Place_cells_What_does_it_prove

Dear Dorian Aur,

If I have understood your view correctly, the results of the EEG/TMS strategy we used to consciously communicate brains (PlosOne, 9, 8, August, 2014) could be interpreted as an empirical argument in favor of your NEC theory. Could you please develop your thoughts a little bit more?

The (NED) model shows that the computation in the brain is performed by physical interaction. It is a different kind of computation, far more powerful than the Turing model (digital computation). The computational part (read, write information) can be combined with a physical approach (e.g. waves, interference) to explain the entire phenomenon where the whole brain computes.  see http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/2.1.2286.5608 

Even one records only the envelope of an action potential, every spike carries imperceptible endogenous waves and nonlinear vibrations generated by molecular structures. As a result, meaningful information embedded within molecular structure (e.g. proteins) is carried out by electrical waves. In this case, the carrier frequency can have a much lower frequency than the ‘modulating’ waveform. An action potential represents the moment of “reading out” meaningful information from molecular structures. During a spike event, meaningful information can also be “written” at a molecular scale in neurons and synapses since subcellular changes in the pattern of gene expression can be easily triggered by external events. The smaller the structure, the higher the generated rhythm of transformation can be.

The occurrence of meaningful electrical patterns within the cell during an action potential generation can be easily explained as a physical process of contextual wave interference in which at least two waves superpose in space. This kind of interference explains the presence of stronger nonlinear vibrations within certain parts of recorded cells that provide fragments of the engram http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636996/ A similar phenomenon occurs during synaptic activities when a flow of ions generate molecular vibrations and electric waves. Therefore, meaningful information that was encoded (written) within neurons and synapses at a molecular level is transmitted synaptically and non-synaptically (wirelessly in both cases) during action potential propagation and all this meaningful information is electrically integrated in the brain.

Physical interaction is critical and without the effect exerted by the electromagnetic field a conscious noninvasive brain-to-brain communication cannot be explained.

In the last fifty years the myth of stereotyped digital action potentials (easy to make mathematical theories) kept us very far from understanding how real computations are performed in the brain.

Dear Dorian, I voted positively for your answer, but my view is that the amplitude modulated waveform contains contributions from dendritic fields and the astroglial network. If one captures only action potentials (as in single cell recordings) then the amplitude modulation seems to be too small to encode a wave. When one captures scalp EEG or local field potentials, besides action potentials also dendritic fields and astroglial activity are included, forming the real brain wave.

Excellent observation, the role of astrocytes enhances  the whole brain view.

Neuroelectrodynamics ( NED )  theory  is about computation, and the basic principle of computation in the brain can be simply understood from an analysis of action potentials. Essentially, every action potential is a non-stereotyped electric vibration with a very broad spectrum so the entire brain can be seen as an efficient computing machine that uses electrical charges to compute . One doesn't need cables/wires to perform  conscious  brain-to-brain communication, wireless (EEG/TMS) transfer of meaningful information

Often two other  views are expressed in neuroscience /computational neuroscience: 

A. The textbook view is based on early models (Adrian, 1914) that have described the principles of stretch receptor of neurons in the muscle where elevated firing rates can entail an increased energetic cost. Lord Adrian’s view of neurons which behave as metronomes firing stereotyped (digital) action potentials was by mistake extended to neurons in the brain. It wasincluded in all textbooks and slightly changed in the last two decades – e.g. spiking neurons . Any student can read these textbooks and then reinforce the idea. Interestingly, lord Adrian didn't have any knowledge about computation – even the description of computing machines appeared far later (Turing 1936).  By mistake  this very naive  interpretation of action potentials was fully adopted in computational neuroscience .The textbook version is reinforced here -see Piotr. 

B. The second academic view highlights the idea that we do not know yet much about the brain and that the future research will tell us everything (see Andrea) .

Well,  it didn't happen and experiments like this one presented here cannot be fully explained since to my knowledge semantics, consciousness .....do not occur in a muscle . Essentially in the last 100 years  (2014-1914)  almost all researchers   made claims about a bright future but ended up reinforcing A - the textbook dogma.  And the question is why?