The first fascinating speaker in the bowels of the Bio-X building (at the <a href="http://biox.stanford.edu/news/symposiums.html">Imitating Life</a> Symposium this morning) was John Donoghue, Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University on the topic of "Turning Thoughts into Action: Neural Interfaces to Restore Movement in Humans with Paralysis"

Here is opens with an interesting image in the bottom left corner – the first cardiac pacemaker (a full push cart of equipment). Neurotech is in an early phase of development, although he notes that 50K people already have deep drain stimulation implants.

“Many diseases impair sensory input but leave cognition intact (spinal cord injury, ALS, stroke, limb loss…)”

He inserts a 4 sq. mm array of 100 neural probes into the M1 arm knob of the cortex. With a random sample of neural signaling from that region of the brain, and some Kalman filtering, patients can instantly control the cursor on screen (unlike biofeedback or sensory remapping which require training). They can deduce motor intent from a sample of an average of 24 neurons.

When connected to a robot hand for the first time, and asked to “make a fist” the patient exclaimed “holy sh*t” as it worked the first time.

Prior to the experiments, open questions included: Do the neurons stay active (other work indicates that the motor cortex reorganizes within minutes of decoupled sensory input)? Can thinking still activate the motor neurons? The test patients had been in sensory deprivation for 2-9 years prior. Will there be scarring and degradation over time? One patient is three years in. What are the neural plasticity effects?