Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian scientist and physician says his work is a result of, “...30 years of basic research of studying the brain...this amazing universe that we have between our ears is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms...”
We have often been told as young children that by desiring alone we cannot achieve what we want to...we had to get up and do it...like kicking a football.
Nicolelis is turning that lesson upside down as he is working on creating, “...sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord...so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorising these devices with lots of different types of sensors, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where—next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move.”
If this seems too imaginative for a scientist, he shows us a video of Juliano Pinto who is paralysed waist downwards and delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian World Soccer Cup here just by thinking.
Nicolelis details out the ecoskeleton or the robotic exterior, “This ecoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again.” One of his patients walked after nine years of being unable to move.
Nicolelis ends by telling us, “The latest is brain-actuating technology: the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain.”
The scientific understanding of mental communication takes one to another level of thought!
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