Earlier this year, four healthy human participants, aged 28 to 50, engaged  in a brain-to-brain communication study conducted by Spanish scientists.

One of the four subjects was assigned to the brain-computer interface (BCI) branch, in India, to transmit the words “hola” and “ciao”; the other three were assigned to the computer-brain interface (CBI) branch of the experiments, in France, for receipt and relay of the message.

The research team used electroencephalography (EEG) to harvest the words as the BCI subject thought of them; they then translated each EEG reading into binary code, and emailed those results from India to France. There, a computer-brain interface relayed the message to the receiver’s brain through noninvasive brain stimulation, in this case experienced as phosphenes:  flashes of light in the subjects’ peripheral vision. The light appeared in numerical sequences, decoded by each receiver’s brain. The recipientss did not report feeling anything, yet successfully presented the messages to the research team.