20 SCIENCE NEWS | March 13, 2021GLENN HARVEYFEATURE | OUR BRAINS, OUR FUTURESScience future: mind meld
Sofia couldn’t sleep. Tomorrow was the big
day. As the project manager for the Nobel
Committee for Physiology or Medicine,
she had overseen years of prize announce-
ments, but never one like this.At 11:30 a.m. Central European Summer Time tomorrow,
the prize would be given to a bird named Harry, a 16-year-old
Clark’s nutcracker. Sofia smiled in the dark as she thought
about how the news would land.
Harry was to be recognized for benefiting humankind “in his
role as a pioneering memory collective that enhances humanminds.” Harry would share the prize (and the money) with
his two human trainers.
Tomorrow morning, the world would be buzzing, Sofia
knew. But as with every Nobel Prize, the story began long
before the announcement. Even in the 20th century, sci-
entists had been dreaming of, and tinkering with, merging
different kinds of minds.
As the technology got more precise and less invasive,
human-to-human links grew seamless, inspired by ancient
and intriguing examples of conjoined twins with shared
awareness. External headsets could send and receive signals
between brains, such as “silent speech” and sights and
sounds.
Next, scientists began looking to other species’ brains for
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