My attention was grabbed by an article in New Scientist, which revealed that experiments were being done in which a robot was controlled by thought alone. The human subject in a laboratory was wired to a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which read his intentions according to which parts of the brain cortex were lit up (in stimulation). This notional action was then relayed as instructions to a robot, thousands of kilometres away, which made the movement that the lab experimenter was thinking about.

Shades of the Avatar movie!

We all know we are on the brink of the era in which we can control computers by means of our thoughts; I even wrote about it in my 1999 best-selling book Virtual Medicine. Well, that day is come…

Moreover, we may soon reach a time when we can use a computer-controlled surrogate body to trek across the Sahara, shoot the rapids in the Grand Canyon, have dinner in Paris with a friend and even go to the moon.

This beats “virtual reality” to Hell and back!

True Embodiment

Tele-operated robots, those that can be remotely controlled by a human, have been around for decades.

This new approach goes way beyond that. What was truly remarkable about this experiment was that the human subject began to feel he actually WAS the robot. He felt it was part of himself. We call that embodiment.

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