REAL LIFE NEWS: TELEPATHIC RATS
by Hazed
As if rats aren’t enough of a nuisance as it is, scientists are giving them telepathic powers!
They have connected the brains of rats in laboratories together with cables, allowing them to communicate with one another directly. It’s done with brain implants that allow sensory and motor signals to be sent from one rat to another.
They then came up with a test to see if a rat that received a signal from another rat could interpret the information. They trained pairs of rats to solve a problem, hooked them up together and designated one the “encoder” and the other the “decoder”. The decoder was put in a chamber where it had to solve the puzzle, but the visual clue needed to do so was sent to the encoder. After a lot of training time, the decoder learned to use the info it was getting through the implant, and after that had a success rate of about 70%.
To really give the system a thorough testing, the team even linked up brains of rats that were thousands of miles apart.
The next step is to link more than two rats together... yes, we’d end up with a rat hive mind. What’s more, this technique might possibly be extended to humans, so within a few decades we could all be assimilated...
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21604005
Postscript to this story: reading a report in a different newspaper I found this wonderful quote from Anders Sandberg, who studies the ethics of neurotechnologies at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University: “I’m not worried about an imminent invasion of ‘rat multiborgs’.”
Maybe not imminent but give them time...
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/feb/28/brains-rats-connected-share-information
And for a discussion about the similarities between rats and the borg: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/01/rats-are-like-the-borg
