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Brain implant turns thought to robot acts
(Researchers train a computer to read monkeys' intentions directly from their neural activity)

RICK WEISS, Of The Oregonian
10/13/03

"It's a major advance," University of Washington neuroscientist Eberhard Fetz said of the monkey studies. "This bodes well for the success of brain-machine interfaces."

The experiments, led by Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham and published Monday in the journal PLoS Biology, are the latest in a progression of increasingly science fiction-like studies in which animals -- and in a few cases people -- have learned to use the brain's subtle electrical signals to operate simple devices.

Until now, those achievements have been limited to "virtual" actions, such as making a cursor move across a computer screen, or to small two-dimensional actions such as flipping a little lever that is wired to the brain.

The new work is the first in which any animal has learned to use its brain to move a robotic device in all directions in space and to perform a mixture of interrelated movements -- such as reaching toward an object, grasping it and adjusting the grip strength depending on how heavy the object is.

"This is where you want to be," said Karen Moxon, a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It's one thing to be able to communicate with a video screen. But to move something in the physical world is a real technological feat. And Nicolelis has taken this work to a new level by quantifying the neuroscience behind it."

The experiment The device relies on tiny electrodes, each one resembling a wire thinner than a human hair. After removing patches of skull from two monkeys to expose the outer surface of their brains, Nicolelis and his colleagues stuck 96 of those tiny wires about a millimeter deep in one monkey's brain and 320 of them in the other animal's brain.

The surgeries were painstaking, taking about 10 hours, and ended with the pouring of a substance like dental cement over the area to substitute for the missing portions of skull. The monkeys were unaffected by the surgery, Nicolelis said. But now they had tufts of wires protruding from their heads, which could be hooked up to other wires that ran through a computer and on to a large mechanical arm.

Then came the training, with the monkeys first learning to move the robot arm with a joystick. The arm was kept in a separate room -- "If you put a 50-kilogram robot in front of them, they get very nervous," Nicolelis said -- but the monkeys could track their progress by watching a schematic representation of the arm and its motions on a video screen.

The monkeys quickly learned how to use the joystick to make the arm reach and grasp for objects, and how to adjust their grip on the joystick to vary the robotic hand's grip strength. They could see on the monitor when they missed their target or dropped it from having too light a grip, and they were rewarded with sips of juice when they performed their tasks successfully.

While the monkeys trained, a computer tracked the patterns of bioelectrical activity in the animals' brains. The computer figured out that certain patterns amounted to a command to "reach." Others, it became clear, meant "grasp." Gradually, the computer learned to "read" the monkeys' minds.

Then the researchers did something radical: They unplugged the joystick so the robotic arm's movements depended completely on a monkey's brain activity. In effect, the computer that had been studying the animal's neural firing patterns was now serving as an interpreter, decoding the brain signals according to what it had learned from the joystick games and sending the appropriate instructions to the mechanical arm.

An amazing result At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm's movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened.

"We're looking, and she stops moving her arm," he said, "but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around."

The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts.

"We couldn't speak. It was dead silence," Nicolelis said. "No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour."

At first, the animals' performance declined compared to the sessions on the joystick. But after just a day or so, the control was so smooth it seemed the animals had accepted the mechanical arm as their own.

"It's quite plausible that the perception is you're extended into the robot arm, or the arm is an extension of you," agreed the University of Washington's Fetz, a pioneer in the field of brain-controlled devices.

Possibilities for the paralyzed John Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University developing a similar system, said paralyzed patients could be the first to benefit by gaining an ability to type and communicate on the Web, but the list of potential applications is endless, he said. The devices might allow quadriplegics to move their own limbs again by sending signals from the brain to various muscles, leaping over the severed nerves that caused their paralysis.

"Once you have an output signal out of the brain that you can interpret, the possibilities of what you can do with those signals are immense," said Donoghue, who recently co-founded a company, Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., to capitalize on the technology.

Both he and Nicolelis hope to get permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin experiments in people next year. Nicolelis also is developing a system that would transmit signals from each of the hundreds of brain electrodes to a portable receiver, so his monkeys -- or human subjects -- could be free of external wires and move around while they turn their thoughts into mechanical actions.

"It's like multiple cellular phone lines," Nicolelis said. "As my mother said, 'You can dial your brain now.' "

hmmm...lots of editing today. Check it out. Soon I'll put all of my little red notebook on to my site.

This would be the e-mails we sent to Curry the night our paper was due:

Oh my god, Ben and I are sitting in school slowly dying as the janitors search us out to chants of "get out of school, its 9:00" and "are they in that room...no...check the next." I fear they approach quickly and swiftly from the west. They weild long swords and maces or maybe those are mops and brooms. Either way I fear for my life as we struggle to complete this heroic quest of writing before the the dragon rears its ugly head over the computer of curry at 3:21 am..... Back to writing..... (This message brought to you by the procrastinators)

correction to the subject box this is not spam here i am with ben, the janitors killed me check this out I have proof. I need to finish before the morning, maybe if I took some time to write and not do e-mails to you I might finish before 3:21 am..... Back to writing..... (This message brought to you by the procrastinators)

Here I am, sitting in the pub lab. Ben is on my right and we have now decided to spend the night. We hid from the janitors by turning off the lights and staing out of the view of the only window in. This is great! I can proudly say I am one of the two people I have ever heard to spend the night at school save for sleep ins/girls night out. We have escaped from the dark and evil janitors who tried to keep the school empty. But alas they are no match for our wit and stealth. Good night Curry we'll soon turn in the papers. We'll even do it before 3:21 am..... Back to writing.....

In an attempt to stay overnight at the school Tamu and i are hiding under a box in the publab! this is no joke, they might come any minute- what is funny is we are not joking

You should read all of our(ben and I) e-mails because they are gold(just read them in order of oldest to newest). Look I sent it in well before 3:21 am..... Back to writing..... (This message brought to you by the procrastinators)
it's 5:59, and Ben and I were joyfully awoken to the sound of crushing metal, the garbagemen came.... so load. Its also rather fresh and brisk we should have left the computors on to heat the room. we nearly died but in the end or more near the middle. At Least I got you the paper. I beg of you come rescue my weathered soul, I am wasting away here with Ben. Maybe we'll go home soon. Goodbye curry, I hope this is not the last time you hear from me as I wither to nothingness.
You know What? I'm dead.I died in a car accident due to Hidie, the drunk. It was a top-secrete assembly i was in we got some very nice makeup though. i have to admit it was pretty freaky to die especially after everyone was gone. I was alone, dead, forgotten, in my own world. My arm began to fall tingle(it fell asleep), I could'nt breath(my throught was crushed by the weight of my head) and all was silent(everyone had gone to the mac and I was left for dead to rot away) I felt forgotten for the first time in who knows how long.
Right now things are good, and I'm happy. On Friday it was my wedding day. Yes, I got married, about 11 times it was quite the festival; everyone in the drama department ended up married to nearly everyone else. It started just a small joke between me and my friend Miranda who said "hey, i wanna get married." So for fun I took it and blew it way out of porportions with suits and wedding dresses, brides maids, best men, a minister, the works. I just like to watch people who get embaressed easily blushing. Other than that I don't really have much going on(wait, now that i think about it i do[this may be a fairly long entry]). I've been fully converted into a drama guy due to acting in three plays, and teching for two; I'm currently in 'Your a good man charlie brown'(i'm franklin), I am starting to only hang out with drama people, I'm starting to gossip about everyone and I am now acting even crazier and more freely then before(I'll explain this when I start talking about prom). Which I guess wil be now. Prom was awesome. I'm glad to say I threw the most fun dancee I've ever been to. I was thinking about it and while tuxes are fun to wear, I got dressed up last year when I went to prom. So, this year I wore nothing less than John Travolta style disco clothes(powder blue poliester shiny shirt, white belt, plaid blue pants and shiny leather shoes) and I owned the dance in similar fasion. People actually made dance circles around me and my friends, it was so fun. And one of the camara guys I hired is like one of the coolest guys I've met(he gets paid $100 a night to go to high school dances and basically just dance. I want his job!). School is... school. I'm sometimes extremely sick of it, but I can never hate something that includes the majority of my friends. Anyways... I gots to go. My homewrk is calling.
Sadly my dear friend/coach/mentor has died. He was a great inspiration to me, heck, he was the only person I've ever met who had bigger dreams for me than I. I will miss him greatly for he was a wonderful human being who devoted his life to help others strive for greatness while he himself did the same. I'll always love you Gogo

I would just like to say that if anyone is out there and see's my site they should look at my new site here at Tamu's World

Hey now...
It looks like I am atarting to have the worst day of my life. Who knows how it will end. Lets have a breif recap
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So I start off well because I am asleep. But, then due to daylight savings time I slept in, missing an opportunity to both study for my chemistry test and

Hey quick note for all the chemistry freaks out there download "chemical calestenics" by Blackalicious. Great Song.