In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell famously said “Watson, come here! I want to see you,” into a telephone for the first time. In 2014 the words “hola” and “ciao” from the brain of a human in India to a human brain in France without anyone saying anything.

An individual in France was attached to a brain-computer interface which translates signals from the human brain to binary code. That code was then emailed to a computer in France where three other individuals were connected to computer-brain interfaces, which translate binary code into brain signals. The email was translated and successfully received by the three intended recipients.

“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways. One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, ‘Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France,” said the study’s coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, of Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School in a statement.

Previous studies on EEG-based brain-computer interaction (BCI) have typically used action-thoughts to send instructions to control output, such as a robot or wheelchair. For the new study, the researchers replaced the control-output with a reverse translator.

A second example of this experiment was conducted between recipients in Spain and France with a total error rate of total error rate of 11 percent on the decoding end and five percent on the initial coding side.

“By using advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and noninvasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write. This in itself is a remarkable step in human communication, but being able to do so across a distance of thousands of miles is a critically important proof-of-principle for the development of brain-to-brain communications. We believe these experiments represent an important first step in exploring the feasibility of complementing or bypassing traditional language-based or motor-based communication,” says Pascual-Leone.

While the technology still has a long way to go, with the rise of wearable technology like Google Glass, it is easy to imagine any number of potential applications for a a computer-brain interface that doesn’t require speech or typing.

The detailed findings can be found in journal PLOS ONE.