About four years ago, John Donoghue’s son, Jacob, then 18, took his father aside and declared, “Dad, I now understand what you do -- you’re ‘The Matrix’!” Dr. Donoghue, 61, is a professor of engineering and neuroscience at Brown University, studying how human brain signals could combine with modern electronics to help paralyzed people gain greater control over their environments. He’s designed a machine, the BrainGate, that uses thought to move objects. We spoke for two hours in his Brown University offices in Providence, R.I., and then again by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows:
Q. WHAT EXACTLY IS BRAINGATE?
A. It’s a way for people who’ve been paralyzed by strokes, spinal cord injuries or A.L.S. to connect their brains to the outside world. The system uses a tiny sensor that’s been implanted into the part of a person’s brain that generates movement commands. This sensor picks up brain signals, transmits them to a plug attached to the person’s scalp. The signals then go to a computer which is programmed to translate them into simple actions.
Q. WHY MOVE THE SIGNALS OUT OF THE BODY?
A. Because for many paralyzed people, there’s been a break between their brain and the rest of their nervous system. Their brains may be fully functional, but their thoughts don’t go anywhere. What BrainGate does is bypass the broken connection. Free of the body, the signal is directed to machines that will turn thoughts into action.
Q. HAVE YOU CREATED A BIONIC NERVOUS SYSTEM?
A. Well, a piece of it. We’ve done it with physical components — wires, computers, electronics, as opposed to stem cells. That would be a biological repair. It’s what Christopher Reeve was pushing so hard for. Reeve hoped you could put some stem cells into the damaged area and they could reconstruct everything. That hasn’t happened yet, though people are working on it.
In the meanwhile, we’re making progress on the mechanical repair. Thus far, five people — “participants” — have received the implant. We have permission to study 14 more. I can’t say that we’ve given them back their ability to control their world. Still, we definitely are at the beginning of getting people to do meaningful things like get themselves a drink of water when they want one. Or move a computer’s cursor, which makes communication possible.
Q. AT THE RECENT WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL, YOU SHOWED A VIDEO OF A PARALYZED WOMAN WHO EMPLOYED HER THOUGHTS TO MOVE A ROBOTIC ARM. SHE GUIDED THE ARM TO PICK UP A GLASS. TO EVERYONE WATCHING, IT SEEMED A MIRACLE.
A. Well, for her it was, too. Most paralyzed people, they’re just like anyone else. Their minds are still working. They just can’t get their brain to control their body. Their dignity suffers because they can’t do anything without assistance — including, in some cases, breathing.
So for this woman, moving the glass was a very big thing. The participants in our study just want the chance to do for themselves and not be dependent. I remember once we were discussing the project with several potential participants.
“Would you like to walk again?” someone asked an interested candidate. “No, I’d just like to be able to scratch my own nose,” he answered.
Q. HOW BONDED ARE YOU WITH YOUR RESEARCH SUBJECTS?
A. You’re not supposed to get involved. But these are remarkable people. You can’t help it. ...
What’s been painful is that we’ve had a couple of tragedies. After our first participant, Matt, left the study, he developed an infection and died very quickly. It’s what happened to Christopher Reeve. They sometimes get these serious infections because they can’t move. We lost another participant, an A.L.S. patient. He died because his ventilator failed. It’s a terrible disease, A.L.S.
Q. HOW DID THIS PROJECT BEGIN FOR YOU?
A. There wasn’t one moment. When I entered graduate school here at Brown in 1976, I wanted to learn how the brain works. That’s too big a question. You have to break it down. So I picked a smaller one: how does the cerebral cortex allow thoughts to become action?
I did my post-doc at the N.I.H., in the laboratory of Ed Evarts, who’d developed a technique for studying single brain cells and learning how their activities related to behavior. The brain, however, doesn’t compute one cell at a time — it computes in clusters. So I could see that for the field to progress, we needed to find ways to study many cells at once. And so, in the 1980s, when I headed my own laboratory, we worked on creating technologies to that allowed us to detect continuous brain activity. That included developing the implant device that’s key to BrainGate. Employing this new technology, we were able to decode many of the brain’s signals and discover how they related to movement.
Q. DID YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT THE SIGNALS MEANT?
A. Yes. We and others did that. Once we did, I knew that a mechanical repair was a real possibility. Since the 1990s, I devoted myself to it.
If there was a breakthrough moment, it came in 2004, after our first research participant, Matt, had the sensor implanted. Matt had suffered a spinal cord injury from an accident. We turned on the BrainGate system and we could see right away that his brain was active. Moreover, the activity of his brain cells changed as he imagined different movements, like moving his hand left or moving his hand right. With that information, we could translate his brain activity so that he could control a cursor motion on a computer screen.
What was so astounding was that we saw the movement part of the brain get active, even though there was no movement possible. We saw that simply imagining a motion, he could activate this part of the brain.
Q. DID YOU EVER LEARN IF MATT’S BRAIN HAD BEEN IMPAIRED BY HIS INJURY?
A. It hadn’t — as far as we could tell. Before our work with Matt, we didn’t know if this part of his brain would still operate after a serious spinal cord injury. A common assumption was that it wouldn’t. But Matt showed that if you could repair the damaged connection, the signals would be there to restore movement. This has profound implications not for only for BrainGate, but for anyone thinking about nervous system injuries.
Q. WHEN DOES BRAINGATE MOVE OUT OF THE EXPERIMENTAL PHASE?
A. We’re still in an ongoing clinical trial. The next step is testing a smaller wireless implant to eliminate the plug that people now have on their heads. And we’re working on miniaturizing the system so that it can go inside the body entirely.
Our goal is to make life as normal as possible for people with paralysis. Off in the future, I see the device as helping them hold down productive jobs and be more independent. But I’d be dishonest, to tell you exactly when that’s going to be. © The New York Times 2010
