It is a horrifying concept: being buried alive. Even more terrible is the prospect of living trapped in our own bodies, unable to move or communicate. It’s called locked-in syndrome. Characters like Captain Pike and Jean-Dominique Bauby, (one fictional, the other not) describe the fear and frustration of living with a healthy mind in a broken body. But there is a real-life hope. As its name suggests, Cyberkinetics’ Braingate Neural Interface device allows patients to open the door between their mind and the outside world. Utilizing years of research studying brain signals, Braingate can read impulses in the brain using tiny implanted wires and translate those impulses into commands for computer cursors, wheelchairs, and perhaps even robotic limbs.
Braingate reads signals in the motor cortex and translates those signals into movements of a cursor on a screen.
The procedure for implanting Braingate may seem pure science fiction, but it works. Hair-thin gold wires are connected to individual neurons in the brain’s motor cortex. These wires are gathered at a small silicon array and connected to a “pedestal” embedded in the skull. This metallic interface is easy to spot (it’s a big metal nub on the top of the head). From the pedestal, signals can be sent to a computer for translation. By interpreting the motor cortex signals, scientists can determine what your brain would be trying to move (arm, hand, finger, etc) if you weren’t paralyzed.
So you have a metal nub in your head, and some wires poking into your brain, what’s the pay off? How about the most intuitive mouse ever: by thinking about raising or lowering their hands, patients can move a cursor on the screen of a PC. Squeeze their imaginary hand, and the cursor clicks. The brain signals aren’t completely mapped out yet, and keeping track of one’s thoughts isn’t an easy task, so the cursor tends to jiggle a little and can be hard to move quickly. That being said, it allows individuals who have a hard time even blinking to be able to communicate with others and manipulate devices from their computer. Check out Kathy Hutchinson, one of the first patients, in this story from 60 minutes, the cable connected to her skull seems to be straight out of the Matrix:
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