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by Karen Rommelfanger Miguel Nicolelis is dedicated to liberating the human brain from the physical constraints of a body . Recently, brain-machine interface engineer extraordinaire  Miguel Nicolelis  connected nonhuman animal brains in a modern-day mind meld called the brainet. For those who don't already know him, Nicolelis is an innovator, dedicated to pushing the limits of what is possible with neurotechnology, and a media darling to boot. One focus of Nicolelis' work has been developing neural prostheses whose function is mediated through wired or wirelessly transmitted electrical activity from arrays of electrodes implanted on the surfaces of nonhuman animal brains. One well-known experiment from the Nicolelis lab involved monkeys that  learned to feed themselves a marshmallow   or even operate a robot on a treadmill via direct connection electrodes implanted in their brains and a prosthetic arm. For extra flash, Nicolelis had a 12-lb monkey (based out of...

By Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD Dr.  Jonathan D. Moreno is one of 14 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania , holding the David and Lyn Silfen chair. He is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. In September I arrived in Geneva to keynote a conference at the Brocher Foundation on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the ghost of John Calvin still casts a long shadow over the stern ethos of the Swiss. It was a glorious day in that oasis of calm and cleanliness, where the sheer power of holding much of the world’s money in its vaults justifies a muffled smugness. Compulsively, I checked my email as my taxi glided past the Hotel President Wilson, the monument o...

The first Neuroethics Journal Club of the Fall 2013 semester was a discussion led by graduate student John Trimper on the ethical implications behind brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) technologies. John introduced the topic by presenting the experimental details and results from a recent paper, published by the Nicoleis lab at Duke University (Vieira et al.), where researchers utilized a BTBI to transfer sensorimotor information between two rats. The BTBI technology allowed for a transfer of information from an “encoder” rat to a “decoder” rat, not using typical bodily interactions, but instead through intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). "Rodent Mind Meld" (Via Wired) The researchers conducted three experiments that demonstrated an artificial communication channel where cortical sensorimotor signals, coded for a specific behavioral response, were recorded in the encoder rat and transmitted to the decoder rat. Once received from the encoder rat, the decoder rat was instructed...

By John Trimper Graduate Student, Psychology Emory University This post was written as part of the Contemporary Issues in Neuroethics course Remember the precogs in Minority Report ? The ones who could sync up their brains via the pale blue goo to see into the future? The precogs from the movie Minority Report Recent findings published in Scientific Reports (Pais-Vieira et al., 2013) suggest that the ability to sync up brains is no longer purely sci-fi fodder, and instead, has moved into the realm of laboratory reality. The relevant set of experiments, conducted primarily at the Nicolelis laboratory at Duke University, demonstrated that neural activity related to performance on a discrimination task could be recorded from one rat (“the encoder”) and transferred into a second rat’s brain (“the decoder”) via electrical stimulation. This brain-to-brain transfer of task-relevant information, provided the encoder rat was performing the task correctly, significantly enhanced the decoder...