Wired article on Matthew Nagle, one of Donoghue’s patients
This is from 9 months ago. It’s about a quadriplegic patient with a Cyberkinetics implant (100 electrode array) who can control a cursor decently. Here’s the link. Amazingly, Matthew says he learned to use the interface in only a couple of days (by which I infer he meant “start to basically use it”, not “have precise, skilled control of it”).
I have to point out that in my opinion, the article’s statement that “Neuroscientists can record and roughly translate the neural patterns of monkeys” is very misleading. It’s not that we can record ALL of the neural activity in a monkey, or completely translate all its thoughts; the best I’ve heard of is recording a tiny fraction related to motor planning and translating it into roughly which direction the monkey wants to move a limb.
January 5th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Thanks to Erik Flister for pointing me to this article.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:09 am
“the best I’ve heard of is recording a tiny fraction related to motor planning and translating it into roughly which direction the monkey wants to move a limb”
I wonder if it’s really decoding a bit of the brain related to motor planning, or would it work if one jammed in the electrodes elsewhere? It seems to be a high-resolution instance of neurofeedback which works because of the sophistication of the brain as much as (more than?) because of the sophistication of the “translation” and recording apparatus.
January 5th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
yeah i agree
my guess is that it would be hard to initially get the brain to recognize that it has a motor control device in an unexpected place if you put the array elsewhere, but that you’d be able to find some way to do so (perhaps by initially training the subject to “think happy thoughts to go right, sad thoughts to go left” or something like that), and that after you did, the brain be able to would adapt to it as a limb.
January 5th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
I think there’s substantial evidence to this effect, as you say “a high-resolution instance of neurofeedback which works because of the sophistication of the brain as much as the sophistication of the ‘translation’ and recording apparatus.” For example, the article from 2001 about an electrode array placed on the tongue which can be rewired to visual cortex (below). THerefore the impressive technology here is really the plasticity of our own biological neural networks, not the de-noising algorithms or the electrode array itself (though those are admittedly pretty cool too).
I am amazed that they were able to keep an array functioning in monkeys for 3 years - I didn’t know they could keep neurons growing on silicon that long even in vitro.
Here’s the “seeing tongue” article: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010901/bob14.asp
January 31st, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I wondering how I can email matthew nagle
February 2nd, 2007 at 2:56 pm
[...] Given the recent progress in the decoding of motor signals from the brain and older progress on sensory feedback from neural prosthetics, this was to be expected. Nonetheless, watching this woman use her arm brings the message home in a visceral way. The spooky thesis of Rodney Brooks that “we will become a merger between flesh and machines” has gotten one step closer today. [...]