epitelepathy

[continued from here]

My uneasy feeling soon passed, though, just as the worry I had initially felt had. Being hooked up to Chrissy was, actually, quite nice: she's a very positive person. Syncing to her could be addictive.

<<So...>> she sent, <<What should we do?>>

I hadn't really thought about activities. My mind went to the closet where I kept some board games, and I felt a jump of excitement from her. She was seeing my mental images. I thought about what games I had, and when I got to chess, I felt a warm/bright feeling from her. I was a bit surprised; I didn't actually play much chess. I liked the feeling from her, though, and got up to get the game.

She got up too, heading to the closet. Of course she knew exactly where it was; she saw my mental image, and probably got a sense of direction from me too. We both stopped briefly when we noticed the other, but then started walking together to the closet.

When you do a sync on the whole brain, it's easier just to go with the flow and do the same thing as the other person. Syncing individual regions such as motor control, its quite easy to resist the weak output of the EMNSA. With each additional region, though, the influences stack... I wasn't just getting motor shadows consistent with walking, I was also getting shadows of her proprioception, sense of balance, some degree of planning consistent with walking, and who-knows-what mysterious influences elsewhere.

I'd guess that if two people spent enough time in sync, they'd become the same person. Their brains would detangle the web of abstract concepts, re-learning associations so as to become mutually understandable. They would pick up thinking styles and ideas from the other, until finally they would start behaving in the same way even when not connected.

While this is interesting, it's not the most useful type of neural connection. I was doing a sync because a sync is easy. You don't have to set up a one-to-one correspondence between brain regions, though: you can hook up regions in one person to entirely different regions in the other. This is known as a heterogeneous connection, or "het" for short.

A het is the same type of connection people use to connect to external hardware. You don't always want a robotic arm to follow the motions of your arm when you're running it. Instead, you hook it up to some patch of brain region, and then you learn to control the activation in that patch. Neural plasticity allows us to re-learn what parts of the cortex are connected to, if we're patient. When a het connection is established between people, you can do things like map the whole cortex of one person down to a small portion on the other person's. (You lose quite a bit of detail, of course.) In theory, your connection to the other person could be like an extra sense. If you could train enough, you could recognize what is going on in the other person's brain without being forced to have the same thing happen in your brain, like with a sync.

A well-trained het connection could allow people to work as a more effective team, in ways a sync cannot. The military has been interested in them for that reason, although the area is quite new and hasn't yet produced anything really interesting. The technology hasn't been around long enough to know very much (although expensive research-level gear has been available much longer than consumer-level wireless headsets like mine). Perhaps two people doing a sync can learn to cooperate better than we think. Perhaps het training for complex connections is much more time-consuming than for the simple ones people already do. No one has used an EMNSA regularly for an extended period of time. It's all open at this point, which is why I've been so excited to see how it develops.

She got to the closet first, and opened the door for me, allowing me to grab the game. This delicate little dance was humorous, especially with the added feature of directly sensing everything that the other person did, and we both felt each other's little bubble of amusement rise to become laughter. I wanted to kiss her. The thought was clear enough that I couldn't cover it up, and I felt her reaction to it as well. She wasn't offended by me being too forward-- she was even a little curious. But not right now. Right now she wanted to play chess.

I was relieved. I had a co-conspirator: she was in my head and didn't really care if I had a few thoughts that might be less than perfectly decent.

Chess was interesting. I could tell right away that she was much better than me, so I was at first expecting to lose. With the sync, though, it wasn't so simple. We could only keep secrets from each other with difficulty, keeping the thoughts out of visual or auditory or emotional space where they were easy to read. She was better at that than me, and one the first game fairly easily. I started learning to pick up on her thoughts in more detail, though, and the second game was much more difficult for her. I learned that if I looked at positions, I could get thoughts from her about them. If I thought of moves, I would get reactions. I was stealing her chess instincts. She tried to stop me, but wasn't very good at it. She could hardly use the same trick on me, since I had no chess instincts to steal.

I won the second game, barely. I was ready to be done with chess, but she wasn't. We were beyond talking. She was frustrated at the loss, angry at me for stealing her skill, but aware that she couldn't blame me since she'd gladly agreed to play psychic chess. I noticed that playing chess together had trained me to recognize a few of her abstract thoughts that had seemed alien before. In any case, I could tell she wanted a rematch.

The third game was close, but she won. She thought about each move for a long time, carefully examining the consequences in an expanding tree of possibilities which went long enough that I couldn't remember it perfectly. She would forget it, too, looking away from the board and trying to think of other things while I made my move, though I was still able to use her chess instincts as before.

We were both mentally tired, and a common feeling made me switch off the helmets when the game finished. I found myself immediately wondering what she was thinking as we put the chess set and helmets away. We ended up having this long conversation about the experience and the technology and political/societal implications, and I asked her out to dinner, but she said she'd better go, and I let her walk herself home, back to my old usual self who doesn't want to be intrusive and is afraid of coming on too strong. (<- Author wrapping things up too fast, sorry.)