An international team of neuroscientists and engineers have been successful in demonstrating noninvasive, direct brain-to-brain communication in human test subjects.

Transmission of information through the internet of two human subjects located 5,000 miles apart has been successful.

The team of researchers, including those from Harvard Medical School, questioned whether or not they could bypass the talking and typing part of the internet and inject the brain activity of one subject in India, to another subject in France.

Researchers from Barcelona, paired with a leading team from Axilum Robotics in France successfully transmitted the words “hola” and “ciao” from a location in India to a subject in France.

The team used an internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted, image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to transmit the messages with error rate of only 15 percent.

In the past, previous studies on EEG brain-to-computer interactions have been between a human brain to a computer. However, in this new study, researchers added another human brain to the other end of the communication rather than a computer.

Four subjects between the ages of 28 and 50 participated in the study. While one subject was hooked to the brain-computer interface and was the sender of the words, the others were assigned computer-brain interfaces and were the receivers of the message.

The subjects received the transmissions and experienced flashes of light in the peripheral vision in numerical sequences. This allowed the subjects to decode the information.

The subjects did not report feeling anything, but were able to correctly interpret the messages.

Researchers hope to eventually enable humans to directly and noninvasively transmit thoughts from one person to another.