[legomylibrum]

>In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant in terms of what was actually achieved.

You're absolutely right; this study is neither novel nor groundbreaking.

On the sending side, forget 90%, success rates of 99% are easy to achieve with some types of BCI systems such as SSVEP or P300. As for the information detected, you might have heard of the P300 speller[1] which demonstrated an easy way to accurately spell out words using a BCI headset.

On the receiving side we see why they opted for binary communication. The 'telepathy' was nothing more than a flash of light being visible for a value of '1', achieved by blasting a region of the brain associated with vision with magnetic fields about as strong as an MRI. That sounds cool, but it is a technique that has been in use for over a decade[2].

So tl;dr, what these researchers have achieved is essentially stringing together two or three decades-old technologies in a not terribly original way.

[1]: http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Applications/Brain-Computer-... [2]: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.long