Brain Chip BrainGate Reads Man's Thoughts

A paralyzed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a BrainGate brain chip that reads his mind.

Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralyzed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001. The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, in Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone. The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.
 
He can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume, thanks to the technology and software linked to devices in his home. Scientists have been working for some time to devise a way to enable paralyzed people to control devices with the brain. Recently four people, two of them partly paralyzed wheelchair users, were able to move a computer cursor while wearing a cap with 64 electrodes that pick up brain waves.
 
Mr. Nagle’s device, called BrainGate, consists of nearly 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted a millimeter deep into part of the motor cortex of his brain that controls movement. Wires feed the information from the electrodes into a computer, which analyses the brain signals. The signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements, offering the user an alternative way to control devices, such as a computer, with thought.
 
Professor John Donoghue, an expert on neuroscience at Brown University, Rhode Island, is the scientist behind the device produced by Cyberkinetics. He states, “The computer screen is basically a TV remote control panel and in order to indicate a selection he merely has to pass the cursor over an icon, and that’s equivalent to a click when he goes over that icon.” Mr. Nagle has also been able to use thought to move a prosthetic hand and robotic arm to grab sweets from one person’s hand and place them into another.
 
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Source: BBC News