Is the brain wired for connection with other people?
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Answer:
Though individual humans may have differing levels of desire for human connection, humans are certainly inherently social creatures. Humans have always formed social groups, whether that be small, nomadic societies, or stationary civilizations with complex social orders. We, as humans, are not homogenous in our needs and desires, but we do tend to organize ourselves in relations to other humans.
Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds....
It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.
The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.
But apart from opening up strange new methods of communication, BrainNet could actually teach us more about how the human brain functions on a deeper level.
"We present BrainNet which, to our knowledge, is the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving," write the researchers.
"The interface allows three human subjects to collaborate and solve a task using direct brain-to-brain communication."