If Hollywood ever makes a prequel to The Matrix, it
could start with the research that scientists at Duke
University are doing with rats. In the sci-fi movie, humans
were connected to a machine and to each other in one
enormous interlinked, well, matrix. It’s not too dissimilar
to what they’ve been doing at Duke. Thanks to technology
they’ve developed that records and transmits brain
signals, they’ve been able to plug rats’ brains into each
other so that when one learns a simple task, the other
does as well. They even managed to connect a rat brain
in Brazil to a rat brain in North Carolina. It seems the
rodents begin to share their identities: acting, for instance,
as if their whiskers were the same length when they’re
not. “We are creating a single central nervous system
made up of two rat brains,” says neurobiology professor
Miguel Nicolelis. Theoretically, he said, there could be
many more in what he called a “brain-net,” or perhaps
even a vast organic computer. “You can imagine that a
combination of brains could provide solutions that
individual brains cannot achieve by themselves,” says
Nicolelis. No mention of plugging human brains into each
other ... yet.
DICKEY, Christopher. You Complete Me. BIG THINK, Around the world in six ideas. By. Newsweek, Apr. 1, 2013. p. 7.
According to Nicolelis, the theoretical existence of a future biological computer consisting of a network of animal or human brains
