[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] By [url=http://www.cnet.com.au/member/Michelle%20Starr/]Michelle Starr[/url] of CNET | March 4, 2013 [b]Rats with electronically linked brains are able to communicate discoveries directly from one mind to another.[/b] With insects, we've seen how effective a collective consciousness can be; ants, termites, wasps and bees all work together extraordinarily well, even if we don't entirely understand how their group communication works. However, scientists (and science fiction writers) have long theorised how powerful such a tool could be to humans. For example, only one child from a pod might need to go to school, transferring any information learned to the rest (although, in practice, we imagine this might run into some problems). Heck, just look at [i]Star Trek'[/i]s [url=http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Borg]Borg[/url]. Terrifying. The concept of shared mammalian intelligence, however, has just taken a step further out of the realm of fiction. A team led by Miguel Nicolelis at the Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina, has developed a brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) for sharing sensory and motor information in real time. Intra-cortical microstimulation (ICMS) conducted via cortical microelectrode arrays implanted into the brains of two rats allowed the animals to transmit information instantaneously — so that information learned by a trained "encoder" rat allowed the untrained "decoder" rat to know the answer to puzzles without the need to learn them first-hand.[/quote] Is anyone else disturbed by this obsession scientists have with empowering rats to overthrow humanity?