Undoing Paralysis

"This is still very much a research study. There's no implication for clinical benefit."
"In many ways, it's like controlling a joystick on a gamepad, just with the mind instead of directly with one's fingers."
"The science fiction mind can run very wild with these types of ideas. But as we are using it right now, these systems simply record information from the brain. That's all there is to it."
"These participants' [patients willing to become research 'guinea pigs'] contribution to science and to our lab and to the greater good of moving medicine forward is something we cannot overlook. They are making a huge, huge contribution, both with their body and with their time -- devoting what little time they have left to science. We owe them everything."
Paul Nuyujukian, Stanford University researcher

Handout   The cable sticking out of this woman's head is attached to an implant in her brain that allows a computer to interpret her thoughts. The woman, dubbed Participant T6 by the Stanford researchers running the trial, has used this technology to browse the Internet on a tablet using her mind.

It's certainly innovative. And one supposes that there wouldn't be too many people willing to have a surgical implant in their skull to enable plugging a computer directly to their brain. But if you knew your time was limited, and you were interested in advancing medical science while at the same time signing on to a far-fetched medical technology that might, for the time you have left, help you to communicate, you just might.

Clinical trial participant T6 [to protect her identity] suffers from the very same neurological wasting malady that the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, does. Her physical faculties are slowly draining away, the effects of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Her condition has advanced, but she is still able to talk, to use a wheelchair, until the time that the terminal disease will completely paralyze her body and mind, leading to her death.

During that interval she has chosen to lend herself to an experimental clinical trial named BrainGate 2. To aid scientists in their search to  find measures that would be of help to people like herself, those who are paralyzed, to communicate. The idea is to program computers to make them functionally capable of reading the minds, and the intentions of paralyzed patients. Scientists implanted a microchip in the brain of this woman.

And their findings wee revealed at the annual Society for Neuroscience Conference that took place on October 21, in Chicago. Post-doctoral Stanford researcher Paul Nuyujukian introduced conference attendees to the success of T6's interaction with the programmed computer that the researchers hitched to her brain. The successful results were repeated with another participant. However, the caution is that the technology is new, still being safety-tested, and it is uncertain whether it will herald the onset of a useful medical application.

If, however, ongoing success is realized with this new brain/computer link irrespective of how crude it appears for the time being, additional applications and refinements of this technology/brain link might prove feasible in allowing paralyzed people to control robot arms and allied prosthesis with their thoughts communicating to and interpreted by computers, in other words replicating the way the brain itself works to communicate with body parts.

The scientists behind BrainGate 2 had developed software customized with a virtual keyboard which allowed research participants to move a cursor to type out messages one letter at a time, with their thoughts propelling the action. The implanted microchip was placed in a part of the brain responsible for hand movements, the participant being asked to imagine moving her index finger left and right on the tablet, her thumb up and down.

Connecting to a cable plugged into the participant's head, the microchip in its turn connects to a computer whose software interprets thoughts, moving the cursor. The scientists recognized the potential for their particular use in a readily available device, a Nexus 9 tablet with an Android operating system, using a Bluetooth connection in conjunction with the computer interpreting the patient's thoughts. The connection can be compared to a wireless mouse.

This linked technology enabled T6 to communicate with the tablet in the very same manner any able-bodied person is able to do; to search the web, send emails and play music with the use of a keyboard app. It's a beginning, a start to a method of communication and independence that may in time be used as a stepping-stone toward a more sophisticated and useful link whereby the paralyzed may become independently mobile once again, linking their minds with technology.