You are wrong. Read the paper (or even the news release) carefully: 1. "All right!" and "Success" were uttered in the Sender's lab, not the Receiver! The Sender can obviously see if the Receiver pressed the button (the video game rocket explodes!) , so saying "All right!" does not alter the experiment. 2. Anyway, the video comes from last year's *demo*, not from the actual experiment. 3. If you read the paper, you would know that during the experiment (and the demo, for that matter), the Receiver was absolutely "blinded", as s/he could not see the computer screen, could not see the experimenters, and wore noise-cancellation earphones. The Receiver was, for all purposes, isolated from the rest of the experiment. 4. Finally, the experiment contained "Control" conditions where the brain-to-brain interface was "disrupted", but neither the Receiver not Sender were aware of it. In these conditions, the Receiver could have used any remaining clue to move the hand. But none of this happened. These conditions are explicitly analyzed in the paper's results.

Individual differences in thoughts must ultimately rely on individual differences in either anatomy or in patterns of neural activation. As far as we know, anatomy is pretty similar across individuals, and that is why neuroimaging studies can do group-level statistics. We do not know much on the differences between patterns of neural activation, but they also seem consistent across individuals.

There are many uses of brain-to-brain interfaces that go beyond communication. Think of neurorehabilitation, for instance: when a person has a stroke, often s/he has to painfully and slowly re-learn motor commands like walking, grasping, and swallowing. That's because the brain, deprived of previous "motor templates" (which were disrupted by the damage) needs to re-learn from scratch. If you could give the brain partial information (copied from a healthy brain, or from the healthy side of the injured brain) on the intended neural activity, it could significantly speed up the process.

That is correct, jythie. The experiment did not cost "millions of dollars", we used equipment that is on the order of few 1,000s (EEG) and maybe 20K (TMS). You can get cheaper versions as well. And all the equipment can be found at your hospital (minus the software the serial cables we built to hack in the back of the machines to sync them). So, it's not stuff you find at Home Depot, but it's not multi-million extravaganza either. And,a s you pointed out, the signal is "direct": neuronal activity is directly modulated by the TMS magnetic field. It is exactly as direct as using electric probes inside your brain (as in deep brain stimulation), only it is non-invasive.