A team of scientists from Harvard University Medical School and experts from France and Spain have successfully transmitted information via the internet between two human subjects located 5000 miles away. The transmission was from India to France.

The computer-mediated transmission could be made possible using internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies. The study was conducted on four healthy participants, in the age-group of 28-50 years.

The device connects directly to the users' scalps and impulses from the sender were picked up via electroencephalogram (EEG) as well as by an image-guided and robot-assisted transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The signal was encoded and sent via the internet to the user on the other end. Once it reached its target destination, the code was then interpreted by a computer interface and delivered to the recipient.

The binary messages were then decoded as 'Hola' and 'Caio'.

"We wanted to find out if direct communication was possible 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," said co-author Mr Alvaro Pascual-Leone in a statement.

The study is published in the Journal PLOS One.