Human telepathy ‘is the natural progression for communication’

So much communication between humans is already silent. As an example, over 55 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day. But what if you could go one step further and allow an implant to be placed in your head to speak telepathically? ‘The possibilities are endless when you get into this notion of human augmentation,’ Prof Rajesh PN Rao, author of the book Brain-Computer Interfacing, tells Metro.co.uk. ‘Humans have been augmenting themselves with tools for so long, right from the Stone Age. ‘Now we have smartphones that we can’t live without and they’re augmenting our capacity to communicate and process information.’ ‘To take us to that next level, in terms of what human beings can achieve, brain-to-brain communication and brain-computer interfaces are essentially a progression along those lines.’ It might seem far-fetched, but scientists are already exploring the vast potential of brain implants. Researchers have experimented with brain implants to improve memory , stop overeating and to facilitate machines to be able to read the thoughts of a person (with Elon Musk’s appropriately-named Neuralink). But allowing one brain to communicate with another ‘telepathically’ would be a big next step. Earlier this year , researchers used a deep neural network – or machine learning – to convert brain signals to computer-generated speech with a 75% intelligibility rate, only tracking simple, ‘expected’ words. But these brain signals weren’t loose abstract thoughts. They were signals measured from the speech centre of epileptic patients’ brains who were already undergoing surgery. ‘We don’t tend to think communication is mind-reading but it already is ‘They’re not thinking a sentence, they are speaking a sentence silently,’ says Mark Huckvale, head of the Research Department of Speech Hearing at UCL. ‘They’re imagining how they would speak a sentence and, in doing so, they would excite the motor […]

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