A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really.

[deborah]

VIDEO

Can we use our brains to directly control machines -- without requiring a body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and maybe for all of us. (Filmed at TEDMED 2012.)

 

[argonne1918]

Many of the younger people here probably don't know the Russians were doing a lot of research in the 1960's & 70's with ESP, Telekinsis, etc. They were WAY ahead of the Americans. Of course, the military paid for it. In the U.S. the CIA was/is doing experiments with Remote Viewing. There are videos on YouTube of the Russian experiments.

 

[Eowyn]

I recently watched a documentary about the experiments with remote viewing conducted by the CIA, and they are truly amazing. From what I understood, anyone could learn how to do it, it was kind of mental projection. They were trained and then that ability just became a part of them. The most interesting thing is that they experimented a deep change, they were not the same persons again and some of them even divorced. At the end one of them said that he could do it almost unconsciously, for example while he was driving. That reminded me of how we sometimes get past life memories, when we are in that "trance-like" state, like children when they are in the cars and start talking about their past lives.