Some serious progress is being made in brain-tech interfaces.
“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.
In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.
Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain.
This is actually pretty keen stuff. Laziness about where the hell the remote is aside, I don’t have a lot of desire to have a technology interface set up with my brain (heck, I work with computers, and I don’t want those buggy beasts coming anywhere near my gray cells), but if I were paralyzed, or even “just” seriously disabled, I’d be much more interested.