KEPW News explores brain-to-brain communication

Presenter: KEPW News Explores: Telepathy. Here’s Echo from Underground Echo, Wednesday evenings at 6 p.m. right here on 97.3:

Echo (for KEPW Newsday): There is a lot going on right now. Inflation is up. Tempers are hot. Democracy is sweating through its suit jacket, and at least three governments are pretending everything’s fine, while quietly Googling ‘How to fake stability in 10 days.’ But while we navigate political theater, environmental panic, and another news cycle shaped like a flaming tire rolling downhill, it’s important to remember there are other frontiers, other stories.

[00:00:45] Some of them are weird. Some of them are wondrous, and some of them hint at a future so vast, so intimate, it redefines what it means to be human.

Welcome, I’m your host Echo, and today we’re tuning into something stranger than fiction, more hopeful than most headlines, and just speculative enough to feel like science fiction, except: It’s happening right now.

[00:01:12] Today’s special: Telepathy. That’s right, folks. Telepathy: the merging of minds and what brain-to-brain communication means for our species, our relationships, and maybe our contact with others, not of this earth.

Let’s begin. Here’s the spark that lit today’s fire: a recent Popular Mechanics article, which dives into the latest achievements and what scientists call direct brain-to-brain communication.

[00:01:40] In 2014, researchers transmitted the words ‘hola’ and ‘ciao’ from one person in India to another in France. No phones, no typing, just EEG, binary code, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and a whole lot of ambition.

And then in 2019, things got even wilder. A project called BrainNet successfully connected three people in a single telepathic game of Tetris. Two senders, one receiver. The receiver had no visual cue. Just a series of flashes triggered magnetically in their brain, relaying the other player’s choices.

The receiver made the right call. Bricks were rotated. Points were scored, minds were merged and blown. It’s not a mind reading, not yet, but it is mind sending the beginnings of intentional brain-to-brain information transform all without a single spoken word.

[00:02:42] Sounds like science fiction, yes. But here’s the part that sticks. Every single part of this technology already exists. EEG, electroencephalograph picks up electrical brain activity. We’ve used it in medicine for decades. TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. This uses focused magnetic pulses to stimulate specific regions of the brain. The combo lets us not just listen to the brain, but talk to it, and when we do, it listens back.

[00:03:23] Okay, Echo, you say that’s cool and all, but what does it mean? Let’s start with the basics. If this technology evolves (and it will), we’re looking at new modes of communication for people with paralysis, ALS locked in syndrome group cognition. Imagine scientists or artists brainstorming together, not with voices, but with streamed thought, emotional connection.

[00:03:47] A future where we feel what someone else feels, not because they told us, but because our brains shook hands in real time. Now, widen the aperture. What does this mean on a societal level in a world where misunderstandings often lead to war? What happens when misunderstandings become obsolete or at least less frequent?

[00:04:10] What happens when empathy isn’t just a concept, but a shared neural experience? Here’s a fun read, horrifying, hypothetical: What if political debates were fought, not with words, but with broadcast thoughts? Oof. What if you could feel what a candidate truly believes right to the static? Would some of them disappear in a puff of logic?

[00:04:31] Would others rise not through charisma, but clarity? Or would it all collapse into signal-jamming and psychic spam filters? Probably, but still worth a try.

And here’s where we go deep. We’ve been trying to talk to animals for centuries, from Cocoa the Gorilla and her 1,000 signs to dolphins trained with underwater keyboards.

[00:04:53] We’ve done our best, but we’ve always been limited by modality, the tools each species use to perceive and express. You and your dog might love each other, but you experience the world in utterly different ways. Sight, smell, vibration, memory. Interneural syncing. If we can develop brain interfaces that decode raw neural patterns, not just words or gestures, but feelings, urges, images, then suddenly the barrier between species starts to crumble. Imagine sinking with a whale, feeling the vast weight of ocean memory echo through your spine. Imagine understanding your crow not by watching it, but by thinking with it, not as a metaphor as reality. And what about trees: Mitochondrial networks, fungal force that communicate across miles.

[00:05:45] What if consciousness isn’t about having a human brain, but about having any pattern tonality that can exchange signal? Maybe our mistake all along was assuming that we needed to translate nature into human. Maybe the future of communication is co-experiencing sinking waves instead of swapping words.

[00:06:05] Okay? Okay. Take a breath. Now exhale. Okay. Into space. Let’s talk about aliens. If we ever make contact and the numbers suggest, we probably will eventually, we’re likely to run into one very big problem. Language, not just vocabulary, but frame, metaphor, time perception, biological reference. The odds that an alien species speaks a recognizable syntax? Pretty low.

[00:06:35] The odds that it thinks in language like ours: even lower. But what if they think in networks or emotions or symbolic matrixes that resemble telepathic thought more than spoken dialect. Here’s where our brain-to-brain tech becomes not just neat, but vital. If we learn how to build neural bridges, not just between humans, but across modality, we might build the first true translation engine for communication and consciousness.

[00:07:06] Not universal translators for speech, but universal interfaces for thought, and that might be with the first contact demands, not a broadcast, not a handshake, but a silent mutual tuning in. Of course, this all comes with big, fat warning labels, and you can send thoughts, can you steal them? If you can feel what someone else feels, can you be manipulated?

[00:07:31] Once we turn the brain into an interface, we’ve entered neuropolitics, neuromarketing, neurowarfare. Think of Facebook. Now, imagine if it could read your micro-emotions in real time. Think of state surveillance program that doesn’t need your phone, just your cortex. This is why all these conversations matter now, while the tech is still in its infancy.

[00:07:54] Because the future of thought sharing shouldn’t belong to billionaires with ad budgets. It should belong to everyone, and it should start from a place of consent, empathy, and boundary.

[00:08:05] We need ethical frameworks. Yes. But we also need artists, philosophers, disabled voices, neurodivergent voices, and non-Western thinkers, because the brain isn’t just a machine, it’s a landscape, and we need many cartographers.

[00:08:21] If we do this right, if we fight for access, for equity, for humility, if we might just live to see a world where empathy is not optional, it’s infrastructural.

[00:08:31] War becomes harder when you can feel your enemy’s grief. Cross- species understanding is normal. First contact is not a press release. It’s a code dream, and if we do it wrong, well then the future might just be sponsored by the Amazon Cortex. Your thoughts delivered. But I like to believe that we’ll choose the better path because I’ve seen what happens when people, especially those pushed to the margins, get their hands on powerful tools.

[00:09:00] They don’t just survive, they rebuild. They make new languages, new art forms, new myths, new ways of being, and in that future, messy, radiant, cracked, open, like a ripe pomegranate. We don’t speak over each other anymore. We listen across boundaries. We tune in together.

[00:09:22] This has been Echo from Underground Echo every Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.  Your favorite place for neural experiments and poetic digressions. But until next time, folks, stay receptive, stay curious, and remember, you are not alone in your thoughts. Not anymore.

[00:09:44] Presenter: KEPW News Explores is a regular feature of your award-winning KEPW News team, 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.