With a
blindfold covering his eyes, and earplugs cancelling out almost all
sound, Dr Michel Berg sat in a state-of-the-art laboratory at the
University of Strasbourg in north-eastern France, and began to think.
Nearly
5,000 miles away, at a research facility in the Indian city of Kerala, a
young Spanish man called Dr Alejandro Riera pulled on a tightly fitting
hat, placed a laptop computer on a white table, and also began to
think.
Over
the course of the next hour, on March 28 this year, the 51-year-old Dr
Berg and his faraway counterpart would attempt something that had only
previously occurred in the exotic realms of science fiction.
Into the unknown: Two scientists have
sent each other a message simply by using the power of their minds. The
research could have staggering iplications for the future of humanity.
File picture
The
two men aimed to send a simple message between each other, across the
continents, without using any of the five senses that human beings — and
indeed animals — have for millennia used to communicate.
They
instead hoped to achieve what scientists call ‘mind-to-mind direct
technological communication’ — and the rest of us would recognise by a
single, tantalising word: telepathy.
The
experiment in speaking via ‘thought’ happened in conditions of absolute
secrecy. Until recently, only a small team numbering a dozen researchers
(including Dr Berg and Dr Riera) were even aware of its existence.
That
all changed a few days ago, however, when PLOS ONE, a website little
known outside academia, published a peer-reviewed scientific paper
detailing its outcome.
The
report is lengthy and jargon-ridden. But to a layman, its findings seem
little short of sensational. For on that afternoon in March, Dr Berg
and Dr Riera were indeed able to achieve ‘conscious brain-to-brain
communication’.
Brave New World: Dr Berg believes that
in the coming decades their research could be used to help stroke
victims, extreme paraplegics, and sufferers of ‘locked-in syndrome’ to
speak and move again.
This, in layman’s terms, means they carried out the first scientifically documented telepathic conversation in human history.
The exchange was nothing if not brief. The duo shared just two words: the Spanish greeting ‘hola’, and the Italian ‘ciao’.
Yet what it might have lacked in colour and complexity, it surely made up for in potential historic importance.
‘We
have shown that it is possible to send a mental message between two
people, without using sight, touch, sound, taste or smell,’ Dr Berg told
me yesterday.
‘This is of course early days, but the discovery could eventually have a profound impact on civilisation.’
The possibilities of telepathy are, indeed, endless.ble: keeping
your thoughts to yourself is about to get a whole lot harder.