[Kolgena]

Wh-- -as th--? Ge---ng pret-- -a- -acket l-ss her-.

Also, earlier comment reminded me of http://xkcd.com/644/

[Nuke]

the brain would write its own drivers eventually.

[S-99]

OK, just fess up. Where are the bodies?

Hidden with my buffie the body posters.....guess you'll have to read my mind for the rest.

[Darius]

If you could put axon caps on the thalamic bridge neurons you could then separate them and get a wi-fi link. Would be interesting to see what latency would do.

Sorry, this is confusing what neurology I know. Axon cap? What differentiates it from an axotomy?

Externally it looks like they're sharing a parietal lobe, which would explain why they'd be able to share spatial sense. I wonder if they also share motor cortices as well...

[Ghostavo]

"Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting ..."

 

[General Battuta]

If you could put axon caps on the thalamic bridge neurons you could then separate them and get a wi-fi link. Would be interesting to see what latency would do.

Sorry, this is confusing what neurology I know. Axon cap? What differentiates it from an axotomy?

Externally it looks like they're sharing a parietal lobe, which would explain why they'd be able to share spatial sense. I wonder if they also share motor cortices as well...

An axon cap is a science-fictional device that just consists of a little (very little) implant that goes at the end of a nerve. One component is an action potential sensor, the other is a transmitter. It's coupled to another axon cap on the nerve(s) that Nerve A would normally connect to. Basically it's a wireless bridge.

[General Battuta]

Excellent in-depth update on the case here.

Evidence is still mixed. It's too early to know whether there's any neural transmission going on, but my hunch is there is at least some form of signaling outside of simple nonverbal cuing.

[MP-Ryan]

Excellent in-depth update on the case here.

Evidence is still mixed. It's too early to know whether there's any neural transmission going on, but my hunch is there is at least some form of signaling outside of simple nonverbal cuing.

Great read.  Certainly sounds like at least some form of neural signals.  The taste sensory input seems to belie nonverbal cues as an explanation.  Pretty amazing.

[General Battuta]

It'll be a really tragedy if they do manage to firewall each other. I wouldn't put it past the brain.

[MP-Ryan]

It'll be a really tragedy if they do manage to firewall each other. I wouldn't put it past the brain.

Nor I, but  while it would be a tragedy for scientific discovery, these are individual personalities; it might be more of a blessing for them.  The scientist in me thinks this is incredible; the soon-to-be parent in me is really conflicted.

[Flipside]

That's what concerns me, as personalities develop, the brain tends to 'fix' connections that were otherwise malleable, I'm a little concerned as to the impact it will have on these two.

[Kopachris]

More like a biological (i.e. not cybernetic) model for the Borg?

In any case, WOW. 

[Mika]

MP-Ryan, I have a question for you.

Occasionally, one hears stories about somebody turning back or just diverting from the planned action just because they had a sort of feeling that something's wrong. The stories go on that the person who diverted tends to find someone having an accident or a sudden attack of illness for example. Also, some wives knew at the time of the accident that something just happened to their husbands - even if there were hundreds of kilometers between them. This sounds folk-loresque, but then again I have met some people describing this happening to them. This is not exactly telepathy in a way I understand it, but some kind of remote sensing without any apparent communication possibilities between two persons. It is usually described as a sudden feeling that something's gone wrong and they have to do something, but that's the only piece of information they seem to share.

Are you aware of any studies over this?

[General Battuta]

What you're describing is probably just confirmation bias.

If someone has a funny feeling and then nothing goes wrong, they fail to recollect it.

If they have a funny feeling and then something goes haywire, they remember it and spread the story.

All there is to it. And no, there are no studies which provide any evidence for said claim, as far as I am aware.

[MP-Ryan]

I'm not aware of any studies either, though I'm a little more open-minded than Battuta on the subject of what is essentially extrasensory perception because there are some cases of it in my own family   In one such instance, my grandfather met us at the hospital because he heard an ambulance in his own community (which was not where we lived) and knew something had happened to my mom.  Meanwhile, my mother had just been standing under an old pear tree when it fell on her, breaking her ankle.  My grandfather had no idea we were at my other relatives property picking pears that day, nor any way of knowing Mom had been hurt.  Even the ultra-skeptic scientist in me can't find a credible explanation in confirmation bias for that one (given that my grandfather had never exhibited the same drive-to-the-hospital-on-siren behaviour before or after).  This was not the first nor last instance my grandfather demonstrated strange quasi-senses, though.  Maybe it was coincidence, but it sure was bizarre.

The optimist in me suspects there are aspects to human sensory perception that go well beyond what we've scientifically documented to date.  There are a lot of species that humans tended to view as having a sixth sense about natural phenomena until we learned to understand it, so I wouldn't be surprised if similar perceptive abilities exist in humans, albeit at extremely low levels.  That's rampant speculation on my part, though, and has no foundation in experimental evidence.

[General Battuta]

There have been studies done in the lab on very controlled forms of precognition, and one of them even claimed to get a result. But it turned out to be a methodologically flawed outcome. By and large they all come back as nulls.

[Flipside]

There's also instances of things like 'Twinspeak', where identical twins speak a language unique to themselves, though, in fairness, that is a slightly different relationship than 'other family members', and Twinspeak rarely lasts into the teens, since individual personalities become more fixed at that stage.

It also shouldn't be discounted that the Human brain notices a lot more than it lets the conscience in on, I had a 'bad' feeling about my Dad several months before his heart attack, but those feelings were almost certainly based more on observational cues than phsychological ones.

[Ravenholme]

I am VERY loathe to call this telepathy, it seems to be a very innacurate way of describing what is a sharing of neural tissue. Just because they only share a hypothalamus (or is it thalamus, been a while since I read the article) does not mean that routed through that they do not have a great deal of neural connectivity. Telepathy refers to something entirely different, which is connectivity of thoughts without any shared tissue/conjunction. Telepathy is, as far as we know, a supernatural/preternatural phenomenon and consequentially does not exist. Given just how essential the tissues they share are, and how closely situated they are to things like the Optic Chiasm (in the Tectum) and the cerebrum, I'm not surprised that as a stable pair of cephalically joined twins they can share thoughts and visual data. (For reference, we refer to the 5 major areas of the brain, developmentally, as the myencephalon [Medulla Oblongata], metencephalon [Pons and Cerebellum], mesencephalon [Tectum], dienecephalon [Epithalamus, Hypothalamus, Thalamus] and the telencephalon [Cerebrum, hippocampus and the olfactory lobes], moving from the spine upwards. This should demonstrate that the whole sharing thoughts/visual data has the 'sites' in the brain situated around where they are actually physically joined)

There might be ways to 'fake' it using technology later on, and perhaps it may exist in the natural biology of some organisms somewhere in this vast universe, but as far as we (biologists, and I say this as someone doing his Honours projects on neurobiology, specifically adult neurogenesis in the hypothalamus) know and believe, true telepathy would be impossible.

Edit:

@ Flipside - Yeah, it's data you subconsciously picked up on being sorted by your brain and attempting to push it through to your conscious thought by the manifestation of it as an 'uneasy' feeling. It's a fairly well documented phenomena, but not mystic in any way, shape or form. (Well, except for demonstrating the capacities of the brain). On the note of confirmation bias, well obviously that happens and sometimes your subconscious is very, very wrong. You tend to forget those times and only remember those when it turned out your subconscious was correctly cueing you in on something.

[General Battuta]

I am VERY loathe to call this telepathy, it seems to be a very innacurate way of describing what is a sharing of neural tissue. Just because they only share a hypothalamus (or is it thalamus, been a while since I read the article) does not mean that routed through that they do not have a great deal of neural connectivity. Telepathy refers to something entirely different, which is connectivity of thoughts without any shared tissue/conjunction. Telepathy is, as far as we know, a supernatural/preternatural phenomenon and consequentially does not exist.

I disagree with your definition there, telepathy just seems analogous to telephony to me.

true telepathy would be impossible.

Well this seems to be true telepathy, the transmission of thought. I don't know why you'd include 'supernatural phenomenon without any causal link' as a definition because that just means it's impossible.

Are you coming into the thread thinking this is some kind of argument that woo-woo psychics have a leg to stand on? It's not. I'm coming at this from the same angle you are.

ed: Oh I think I see where you're coming from. The reason this is interesting as a model for wireless telepathy is that it proves the brain can develop the protocols for transmission. In an optimistic scenario, cut these kids' bridge apart and fit the nerve endings with axon caps and voila you've got wireless telepaths.

[Ravenholme]

I am VERY loathe to call this telepathy, it seems to be a very innacurate way of describing what is a sharing of neural tissue. Just because they only share a hypothalamus (or is it thalamus, been a while since I read the article) does not mean that routed through that they do not have a great deal of neural connectivity. Telepathy refers to something entirely different, which is connectivity of thoughts without any shared tissue/conjunction. Telepathy is, as far as we know, a supernatural/preternatural phenomenon and consequentially does not exist.

I disagree with your definition there, telepathy just seems analogous to telephony to me.

true telepathy would be impossible.

Well this seems to be true telepathy, the transmission of thought. I don't know why you'd include 'supernatural phenomenon without any causal link' as a definition because that just means it's impossible.

Are you coming into the thread thinking this is some kind of argument that woo-woo psychics have a leg to stand on? It's not. I'm coming at this from the same angle you are.

ed: Oh I think I see where you're coming from. The reason this is interesting as a model for wireless telepathy is that it proves the brain can develop the protocols for transmission. In an optimistic scenario, cut these kids' bridge apart and fit the nerve endings with axon caps and voila you've got wireless telepaths.

Okay, there I agree with you, but in there current case I would not call it Telepathy as they essentially share the same brain, they've just got doubles of some part and they've got stable neurological links between them, which actually makes it a VERY fuzzy area biologically to define whether they are in fact seperate entities. Note I say biologically, as the fact that they have different Cerebrum's and slight developmental differences means that these two seperate portions of the brain have distinct personalities. I imagine, given the sharing in input stimuli and thought, it's like having the most extreme form of being bipolar.