Do you still remember the cartoon series, Pinky and The Brain? It made me wonder why someone as smart as The Brain would want to hang out with Pinky who more often than not thwarts the former’s plan to take over the world due to Pinky’s relatively low IQ count. Well, scientists have managed to connect the brains of lab rats successfully, where communication is done straight to one another through cables. The wired brain implants pave the way for sensory and motor signals to be sent from one rat to another, which would be the first ever rat-based brain-to-brain interface.

Of course, what is the point of such a system if the receiver could not interpret the information sent correctly and accurately? Professor Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina are the ones behind this ambitious project, where there will be an “encoder” rat, while the other rat is the “decoder”. The learning process is far from easy, taking around an hour each day, with 45 days in total to get the rat to know what’s right.

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