So, it's mind control rodent army time at last, is it?

When I first started graduate school, I told all my friends (most of whom were theater folk) that I was going off to become a neuroscientist so I could gather a great mind-control rodent army and thereby take over the world. Well, let's just say I had the normal graduate school experience and got distracted by the VERY early pilot testing phase of this project. (I study molecular differences between synapses.) But I am glad (and only a little jealous) to know that someone was getting busy while I was getting into microscopic esoterica.

On April 3, an American and Korean team of researchers revealed in PLoS ONE that they had managed to get a non-invasive brain2brain interface up and running between a human and a rat. This involved EEG-based detection of the human subject's visual attention coupled to a transcranial ultrasound device capable of targetted activation of a rat's motor cortex.

The long and the short of it was that the human subject's concentration could cause the rat to twitch its tail. These may seem like humble beginnings for a fearsome fighting force capable of world domination, but you know what they say – today the tail, tomorrow the world.

Yoo S-S, Kim H, Filandrianos E, Taghados SJ, Park S (2013) Non-Invasive Brain-to-Brain Interface (BBI): Establishing Functional Links between Two Brains. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060410