Electrodes attached to the brain of a host "encoder" rat in Brazil processed the motor-oriented mental activity for a desired behavior, such as pressing a lever on cue, and converted it into a signal that was then received by a "decoder" rat as far away as Duke's US campus.
Inthe second experiment, a scan of the decoder's brain showed that it began to represent the encoder's whiskers as well as its own whiskers inthe tactile cortex.
In Prof Nicolelis' first experiment, theencoder rat got a bigger reward if the decoder also made the right choice, leading to two-way neural collaboration between the two rats.