159th anniversary Tagore vs Einstein: One of the most important historical discussion about religion and science

Credit: wikipedia

Updated 11/05/2020

Rabindranath Tagore's 159th anniversary: Why Bengal prays to a poet

For Bengalis, Tagore's birth date in the Western calendar shifts every year, just like it does for holy festivals—the poet is celebrated like a god

Rabindra Jayanti 2020: Know Interesting Facts From Rabindranath 

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On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.

The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?

Rabindranath Tagore Biography & Facts Britannica

TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.

I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.

Rabindranath Tagore: Friendship and love The Economic Times

EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.

Albert Einstein walking on down the street Pinterest

TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.

Tagore Translation Deemed Racy Is Pulled From Stores in China The New York Times

EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.



TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.

TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

Rabindranath with Einstein in 1930 Credit: wikipedia

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.consciousness, and philosophy

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.

TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.

EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.

TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.

EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.

TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.

EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.

In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!

TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.


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The discovery that overturns all knowledge of geography. It was found a new continent Called 'Zealandia'

Topography of Zealandia. The linear ridges running north-northeast and southwest away from New Zealand are not considered part of the continental fragment, nor are Australia (upper left), Fiji or Vanuatu (top centre). Credit: wikipedia

Kids are frequently taught that seven continents exist: Africa, Asia, Antarctica, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Geologists, who look at the rocks (and tend to ignore the humans), group Europe and Asia into its own supercontinent - Eurasia - making for a total of six geologic continents.

But according to a new study of Earth's crust, there's a seventh geologic continent called 'Zealandia', and it has been hiding under our figurative noses for millennia.

Make-up of the 4.9 M km 2 continent of Zealandia in the SW Pacific

The 11 researchers behind the study argue that New Zealand and New Caledonia aren't merely an island chain.

Instead, they're both part of a single, 4.9-million-square kilometre (1.89 million-square-mile) slab of continental crust that's distinct from Australia.

"This is not a sudden discovery but a gradual realisation; as recently as 10 years ago we would not have had the accumulated data or confidence in interpretation to write this paper," they wrote in GSA Today, a Geological Society of America journal.

Ten of the researchers work for organisations or companies within the new continent; one works for a university in Australia.

Zealandia: Earth's Hidden ContinentThis City Knows  Urban Trekkers

But other geologists are almost certain to accept the research team's continent-size conclusions, says Bruce Luyendyk, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (he wasn't involved in the study).


"These people here are A-list earth scientists," Luyendyk tells Business Insider.


"I think they have put together a solid collection of evidence that's really thorough. I don't see that there's going to be a lot of pushback, except maybe around the edges."

Why Zealandia is almost certainly a new continent

N. Mortimer et al./GSA Today

The concept of Zealandia isn't new. In fact, Luyendyk coined the word in 1995.

But Luyendyk says it was never intended to describe a new continent. Rather, the name was used to describe New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a collection of submerged pieces and slices of crust that broke off a region of Gondwana, a 200 million-year-old supercontinent.

"The reason I came up with this term is out of convenience," Luyendyk says.

"They're pieces of the same thing when you look at Gondwana. So I thought, 'why do you keep naming this collection of pieces as different things?'"

Researchers behind the new study took Luyendyk's idea a huge step further, re-examining known evidence under four criteria that geologists use to deem a slab of rock a continent:

Land that pokes up relatively high from the ocean floor

• A diversity of three types of rocks: igneous (spewed by volcanoes), metamorphic (altered by heat/pressure), and sedimentary (made by erosion)

• A thicker, less-dense section of crust compared to surrounding ocean floor

• "Well-defined limits around a large enough area to be considered a continent rather than a microcontinent or continental fragment"

Over the past few decades, geologists had already determined that New Zealand and New Caledonia fit the bill for items 1, 2, and 3.

After all, they're large islands that poke up from the sea floor, are geologically diverse, and are made of thicker, less-dense crust.

This eventually led to Luyendyk's coining of Zealandia, and the description of the region as 'continental', since it was considered a collection of microcontinents, or bits and pieces of former continents.

The authors say the last item on the list - a question of "is it big enough and unified enough to be its own thing?" - is one that other researchers skipped over in the past, though by no fault of their own.

Journey to Zealandia, Earth's Hidden 8th Continent

At a glance, Zealandia seemed broken-up. But the new study used recent and detailed satellite-based elevation and gravity maps of the ancient seafloor to show that Zealandia is indeed part of one unified region.

The data also suggests Zealandia spans "approximately the area of greater India", or larger than Madagascar, New Guinea, Greenland, or other microcontinents and provinces.

"If the elevation of Earth's solid surface had first been mapped in the same way as those of Mars and Venus (which lack […] opaque liquid oceans)," they wrote.

"We contend that Zealandia would, much earlier, have been investigated and identified as one of Earth's continents."

The geologic devils in the details

The study's authors point out that while India is big enough to be a continent, and probably used to be, it's now part of Eurasia because it collided and stuck to that continent millions of years ago.

Zealandia, meanwhile, has not yet smashed into Australia; a piece of seafloor called the Cato Trough still separates the two continents by 25 kilometres (15.5 miles).

N. Mortimer et al./GSA Today

One thing that makes the case for Zealandia tricky is its division into northern and southern segments by two tectonic plates: the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate.

This split makes the region seem more like a bunch of continental fragments than a unified slab.

But the researchers point out that Arabia, India, and parts of Central America have similar divisions, yet are still considered parts of larger continents.

"I'm from California, and it has a plate boundary going through it," Luyendyk says.

"In millions of years, the western part will be up near Alaska. Does that make it not part of North America? No."

What's more, the researchers wrote, rock samples suggest Zealandia is made of the same continental crust that used to be part of Gondwana, and that it migrated in ways similar to the continents Antarctica and Australia.

The samples and satellite data also show Zealandia is not broken up as a collection of microcontinents, but a unified slab.

Instead, plate tectonics has thinned, stretched, and submerged Zealandia over of millions of years. Today, only about 5 percent of it is visible as the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia - which is part of the reason it took so long to discover.

"The scientific value of classifying Zealandia as a continent is much more than just an extra name on a list," the scientists wrote.

"That a continent can be so submerged yet unfragmented makes it a useful and thought-provoking geodynamic end member in exploring the cohesion and breakup of continental crust."

Luyendyk believes the distinction won't likely end up as a scientific curiosity, however, and speculated that it may eventually have larger consequences.

"The economic implications are clear and come into play: What's part of New Zealand and what's not part of New Zealand?" he says.

Indeed, United Nations agreements make specific mentions of continental shelves as boundaries that determine where resources can be extracted - and New Zealand may have tens of billions of dollars' worth of fossil fuels and minerals lurking off its shores.

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The ambitious project of the American Natural History Museum through which all the Darwin's manuscripts will be published online

Three quarter length studio photo showing Darwin's characteristic large forehead and bushy eyebrows with deep set eyes, pug nose and mouth set in a determined look. He is bald on top, with dark hair and long side whiskers but no beard or moustache. His jacket is dark, with very wide lapels, and his trousers are a light check pattern. His shirt has an upright wing collar, and his cravat is tucked into his waistcoat which is a light fine checked pattern. Credit: wikipedia

While we can never pick Charles Darwin’s brilliant brain, a collaborative project is bringing us closer to his thoughts than ever before. As of his week, to mark the 155th anniversary of the publication of his iconic book On the Origin of Species, the Darwin Manuscripts Project has made a treasure chest of Darwin’s hand-written notes available online, allowing people across the globe to trace the development of the man that changed the way we look at the world.

The project, which is a collaboration between the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and Cambridge University Library, was founded in 2003, and set out to digitize and transcribe a collection of Darwin’s writings. So far, more than 16,000 high resolution images of the naturalist’s notes, scientific writings and sketches have been made publicly available, but the project is only halfway through.

In mid-July 1837 Darwin started his "B" notebook on Transmutation of Species, and on page 36 wrote "I think" above his first evolutionary tree. Credit: wikipedia

The documents hitherto released cover 25 years of Darwin’s life, “in which Darwin became convinced of evolution; discovered natural selection; developed explanations of adaptation, speciation, and a branching tree of life; and wrote the Origin,” according to the AMNH site.

You can even see a drawing by one of Darwin’s children, a scene of carrot and aubergine cavalry, which was sketched on the back of a page of the On the Origin of Species manuscript. You can also see his first use of “natural selection” as a scientific term, among many other things.

By June 2015, the archive will host more than 30,000 documents authored by Darwin between 1835 and 1882. The next release will cover the notes of his eight post-Origin books. The ultimate goal of the project, the AMNH explains, is to provide “access to the primary evidence for the birth and maturation of Darwin’s attempts to explore and explain the natural world.”

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Frederik The Great: The most beautiful stallion in the United States

Mirror mirror on the wall: Frederik is said to be the fairest of them all, with many dubbing him the world's most handsome horse

He's the real life Black Beauty.

And Frederik The Great, a breathtakingly beautiful Friesian stallion from the United States, may just be the world's most handsome horse.

Sharing his name with the ruler of Prussia from 1740-1786, the highly acclaimed horse has a muscular build, striking black features and flowing mane.

Credit: dailymail

The mane attraction: Frederik The Great is a breathtakingly beautiful Friesian stallion from the United States

The beautiful stallion is owned by Pinnacle Friesians where he stands at stud in the Ozark Mountains in the US. 

With a Facebook fan page of more than 12,500 followers and a blog to his name, the stunning stallion has amassed quite a hefty fan following.


So popular is the horse that an online gallery featuring artwork of him has been created. 

Lustrous locks: 'That hair! It's like someone crossed a horse with the hunky lead from a romance novel,' Boredom Therapy wrote Credit: dailymail

A breathtaking video shot recently shows Frederik galloping freely, with his long black mane billowing in the wind.

'That hair! It's like someone crossed a horse with the hunky lead from a romance novel,' Boredom Therapy wrote. 

The equine treasure's legacy will continue with his first offspring born in August 2015.

Stunning stallion: Frederik is as photogenic as he is handsome 

Vaughn, a Friesian colt, shares the same striking appearance as its father and at just nine months old is completely adorable.

Fans of Frederik The Great have expressed their love for the handsome horse.

'Frederik, you are the most beautiful horse that I have ever seen. Only God could of created such artistry. Breath taking & magnificent,' one person wrote.

'There will NEVER be a more majestic, handsome, sexy horse on the face of the earth. Never, ever. I wish I could just touch and 'smell' him just once,' wrote another. 

Photography by Cally Matherly.

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Deep-sea dragonfish, one of the most bizarre creatures of the Sea - VIDEO

Dragonfish are the stuff of nightmares with their oversized jaws and rows of fanglike teeth. The deep sea creatures may be only several centimeters long, but they can trap and swallow sizeable prey. How these tiny terrors manage to open their mouths so wide has puzzled scientists, until now.

In most fish, the skull is fused to the backbone, limiting their gape. But a barbeled dragonfish can pop open its jaw like a Pez dispenser — up to 120 degrees — thanks to a soft tissue joint that connects the fish’s head and spine, researchers report February 1 in PLOS ONE. 

BIG GULP This X-ray image reveals that a dragonfish has eaten a large lanternfish in a single gulp.

Nalani Schnell of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and Dave Johnson of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., examined preserved specimens of nine barbeled dragonfish genera. 

Five had a flexible rod, called a notochord, covered by special connective tissue that bridged their vertebrae and skulls. When Schnell and Johnson opened the mouths of the fish, the connective tissue stretched out. The joint may provide just enough give for dragonfish to swallow whole crustaceans and lanternfish almost as long as they are.

OPEN WIDE  Some species of dragonfish (Eustomias obscurus shown) open their jaws like Pez dispensers, thanks to a flexible joint at the base of their skulls. The joint may allow the fish to swallow bigger prey, which they trap with their fanglike teeth.

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Amazing Spider Silk properties will lead to the creation of artificial muscles

Our muscles are amazing structures. With the trigger of a thought, muscle filaments slide past each other and bundles of contracting fibers pull on the bones moving our bodies. The triggered stretching behavior of muscle is inherently based in geometry, characterized by a decrease in length and increase in volume (or vice versa) in response to a change in the local environment, such as humidity or heat.

Variations of this dynamic geometry appear elsewhere in nature, exhibiting a variety of mechanisms and structures and inspiring development in artificial muscle technology. 

Spider silk, specifically Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk, now offers the newest such inspiration thanks to research from a collaboration of scientists in China and the U.S., the results of which are published today in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

Credit: British Tarantula Society

"Spider silk is a natural biological material with high sensitivity to water, which inspires us to study about the interaction between spider silk and water," said Hongwei Zhu, a professor in Tsinghua University's School of Material Science and Engineering in Beijing and part of the collaboration. "Ornithoctonus Huwena spider is a unique species as it can be bred artificially and it spins silk of nanoscale diameter."

Besides the shrink-stretch ability of muscles, the way in which the motion is triggered -- how the muscle is actuated -- is a key part of its functionality. These spider silk fibers, actuated by water droplets, showed impressive behavior in all the ways that matter to muscle performance (or to super heroes that may need them to swing from buildings).

"In this work, we reveal the 'shrink-stretch' behavior of the Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk fibers actuated by water, and successfully apply it on weight lifting," said Zhu. "The whole process can cover a long distance with a fast speed and high efficiency, and further be rationalized through an analysis of the system's mechanical energy."

The research team looked at the actuation process in a few different scenarios, capturing the macro dynamics of the flexing fibers with high speed imaging. They actuated bare fibers on a flat surface (a microscope slide) and while dangling from a fixed point (held with tweezers) before adding a weight to the dangling configuration to test its lifting abilities.

Zhu and his group also investigated the micro structure of the proteins that make up the fibers, revealing the protein infrastructure that leads to its hydro-reflexive action.

Electron microscopy gave a clear picture of the smooth inner threads that make up the fibrous structure, and a laser-driven technique, called Raman spectroscopy, revealed the precise conformation of the protein folding structures making up each layer. Fundamentally, the specific molecular configurations, in this case having proteins that have a strong affinity for water and that rearrange in the presence of water, give rise to the spider silk's actuation.

"Alpha-helices and beta-sheets are two types of secondary protein folding structures in spider silk proteins," said Zhu. "Beta-sheets act as crosslinks between protein molecules, which are thought relevant to the tensile strength of spider silk. A-helices are polypeptide chains folded into a coiled structure, which are thought relevant to the extensibility and elasticity in spider silk protein."

Returning the fiber back to its relaxed state (as one-use muscles are far less useful) requires only removing the water, which offers conservation along with its simplicity. With some fine tuning, there is also potential for designing the precise behavior of the shrink-stretch cycle.

"In addition, as the falling water droplet can be collected and recycled, the lifting process is energy-saving and environmentally friendly," said Zhu. "This has provided the possibility that the spider silk can act as biomimetic muscle to fetch something with low energy cost. It can be further improved to complete staged shrink-stretch behavior by designing the silk fiber's thickness and controlling droplet's volume."

Understanding this remarkable material offers new insight for developing any of a number of drivable, flexible devices in the future.

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New Revolutionary mind-reading technology allows immobilized patients to communicate again

Credit: Wyss Centre

The technology to control a computer using only your thoughts has existed for decades. Yet we’ve made limited progress in using it for its original purpose: helping people with severe disabilities to communicate. Until now, that is.

The final stages of the degenerative condition known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease, leaves sufferers in a complete locked-in state. In the end they cannot move any part of their bodies, not even their eyes, although their brains remain unaffected.

But scientists have struggled to use brain-computer interface technology that measures electrical activity in the brain to help them communicate.

One reason for this is that it is still unclear how much these conventional brain-computer interface systems rely on electrical signals that are generated by the movement of eye muscles.

One ALS sufferer who had been using a brain-computer interface when she could still move her eyes lost her ability to communicate through the technology after becoming completely locked-in.

This suggested that most of the electrical activity recorded by the computer was related to involuntary eye movements that occurred when she thought about something rather than the thoughts themselves.


To overcome this problem, an international group of researchers used a different way of detecting neural activity that measures changes in the amount of oxygen in the brain rather than electrical signals.

A new study has shown that an alternative brain-computer interface technology can help people with 'locked-in syndrome' speak to the outside world. It has even allowed sufferers to report that they are happy, despite the condition.

The research, published in PLOS Biology, involved a technique known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which uses light to measure changes in blood oxygen levels.

Because the areas of the brain that are most active at any given time consume more oxygen, this means you can detect patterns of brain activity from oxygen fluctuations.

This technique is not as sensitive to muscular movements as the electroencephalography (EEG) systems used to measure electrical activity.

An EEG recording setup Credit: wikipedia

This means the new method could be used to help ALS sufferers communicate both before and after they lose their entire ability to move because it is more likely to only record brain activity related to thoughts.

The study involved four ALS sufferers, three of which had not been able to reliably communicate with their carers since 2014 (the last one since early 2015).

By using the new brain-computer interface technology, they were able to reliably communicate with their carers and families over a period of several months. This is the first time this has been possible for locked-in patients.

The volunteers were asked personal and general knowledge questions with known "yes" or "no" answers.

The brain-computer interface captured their responses correctly 70 percent of the time, which the researchers argued was enough to show they didn’t just record the right answer by chance. Similar experiments using EEG didn’t beat this chance-level threshold.

The patients were also able to communicate their feelings about their condition, and all four of them repeatedly answered "yes" when they were asked if they were happy over the course of several weeks.

One patient was even asked whether he would agree for his daughter to marry her boyfriend. Unfortunately for the couple, he said no. The volunteers have continued using the system at home after the end of the study.

As I know from my own research, working with completely locked-in patients requires a lot of hard work. In particular, you can’t know for sure if the user has understood how we want them to give an answer that we can try to detect.

If a system that has previously been used to record the brain activity of able-bodied users doesn’t work with locked-in patients, it is common to assume that the person, and not the machine, is at fault, which may not be the case.

What’s more, there is added pressure on researchers – from the patient’s family and from themselves – to fulfil the dream of finding a way to communicate with the volunteers.

These challenges highlight what a significant achievement the new study is. It is a groundbreaking piece of research that could provide a new path for developing better brain-computer interface technology.

Even though the system so far only allows locked-in patients to give yes or no answers, it already represents a big improvement in quality of life.

The first ever brain-computer interface system was designed to enable disabled (although not locked-in) users to spell words and so communicate any message they wanted, admittedly through a slow and lengthy process.

So it is safe to assume that the new technology is just the first step towards more sophisticated systems that would allow free two-way communication not based on simple questions.

Perhaps more importantly, the technology has already restored the communication capabilities of four people who had been mute for years. Imagine how these patients and their families must have felt when they were finally able to 'speak' again.


Despite the challenges in brain-computer interface research, results like this are what make us keep going.


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