In 2002, a man in New York closed his fist and a robot hand in Reading, England, closed with him. Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor, had a hundred-electrode array wired into the median nerve of his arm, with the wires sticking out through the skin. The robot hand gripped objects across the Atlantic, and the pressure it felt came back into his nerve, so he knew how hard he was squeezing.
That was the first of three things Warwick did, and Max Talanov remembers all three. Talanov develops next-generation neural networks and works at a neurorehabilitation centre in Sicily and at an AI institute in Serbia. The second thing was a range-finder wired to the same nerve, so that the closer an object came, the stronger the signal. Warwick could feel distance, a bit like a bat. The third was his wife.
Electrodes were placed in her median nerve too. When she clenched her hand, he felt her nervous system acting on his own. Talanov says this woman impresses him, perhaps more than Warwick himself. Warwick dreamed of what came next: a link from one brain to another, not just brain to computer.
Talanov has his own idea of what to send down that link. Not words. Not images. A chemical level.
Neuromodulators are the substances that set the mood of a brain, dopamine and serotonin among them. Talanov's bet is that it would be wonderful to talk to another person by passing along the level of a neuromodulator. Why would anyone want that? Because, as he puts it, we understand each other badly.
We have the visual channel: faces, tone of voice, posture. Empathic people read it well. Talanov does not. He is autistic, and by his own count he fails to recognise 70% of other people's emotions. His brain cannot reconstruct what his wife's neuromodulator levels are, he says, simply because it is built differently from hers. So he cannot tell how upset she is, or how happy.
A direct link would skip the guessing. Instead of decoding a frown, you would feel the state itself.
Is that science fiction? The pieces are at least real. A 2024 paper in Nature Human Behaviour, by Seth Batten and colleagues, tracked these chemicals in people making decisions. Dopamine rose and fell with changes in the value of an offer, the way a reward-prediction error does, while serotonin followed the value of the offer on the table. So the brain's chemistry carries readable signals. A 2024 article in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics adds that advances in brain-to-brain interfaces raise the possibility of two or more people directly sharing thoughts, emotions and sensory experiences.
Talanov doesn't claim any of this exists. He calls it something that would be nice to have, and puts it in a list. It would be good to have infrared vision, he says, or to see the Moon magnified a thousand times, or ultraviolet sight. And to plug into other people, if we want to.
It would be great to communicate with another person by passing along the level of a neuromodulator.
здорово было бы коммуницировать с другим человеком посредством того, чтобы передавать уровень нейромодулятора.
— Max Talanov, Think Like a Scientist, 09:08
The words "if we want to" matter. Warwick's wife agreed to have wires in her arm. Talanov's picture is a choice made by both people, not a mind-reading machine.
There is a plain obstacle too, and he names it: the nervous system is hard to talk to. Feedback from the nerves is, in his words, a big problem even for today's bionic prostheses. A link that carries a mood is a harder version of the same problem.
Still, the direction is set. A man once felt a robot's grip across an ocean, and then his wife's clenched hand. The next step Talanov imagines is smaller in hardware and larger in meaning: not sensing her muscles, but feeling how she feels, without having to guess.
