The ultimate aim is not just speech but restoration of full bodily function. If Kennedy has his way, someday the blind will see and the paralyzed will walk—and other researchers are racing him to make those things happen.
Miguel Nicolelis says his quadriplegic subjects will walk again—not in 10 or 20 years, but in just a few. We are talking over the phone when he makes this grand statement from a restaurant in Brazil. He is effusive on this call, pausing in a long conversation only once, to order sushi in his native Portuguese. Nicolelis says he’s confident he has solved most of the technical problems once dogging brain electrodes, and he’s mostly ignoring naysayers who think it can’t be done. “They can go on saying what they want to, but I am just going ahead and doing it,” he states.
Specifically, he is leading an international consortium based in Brazil called the Walk Again Project. Other participating nations include the United States, Israel, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and France, as well as a country in the Arab world and one in Africa he cannot yet announce. Together they are aiming to do what sounds miraculous: help paralyzed quadriplegics walk again, not by fixing their lesions or broken spines but by creating wearable robotic exoskeletons controlled by neural signals. The effort will be based at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal.
Setting Our Brains Free
While the immediate future is filled with hope for the disabled, cyborg technology may soon spread, giving ordinary people extraordinary skills. The possibilities are both terrifying and amazing: Brain implants might be the key to interspecies communication, for instance, and could offer true immortality as our brain patterns find new life in the belly of a machine. From bloodless wars (fought with cyborg-controlled robots) to apparent mind reading, the cyborg age could change the meaning of being human and thrust us into another evolutionary realm.
It seems like our logical destiny, according to the futurist Ray Kurzweil. “We already have brain implants for people with Parkinson’s disease and computerized implants for other conditions such as deafness and epilepsy,” he says. “Some people may articulate an abstract opposition to the idea of merging with machines, but that is how we will get from where we are now to my conception of the future, through many steps, each one benign and useful.”
Kennedy is convinced that neural implants will inevitably be used to download information into our brains, creating superintelligent humans. He speculates that astronauts equipped with implants will tap into the massive amount of information they will need while colonizing the moon or exploring the universe.
He would also like to work with neural speech prostheses in great apes. “Already we know they can understand a lot of human language and sign language. What if we could find a way to give them synthesized speech?” he asks. “What would we learn from them?”
The melding of man and machine appears inevitable, Kennedy believes. “It’s not hard to imagine that eventually somebody’s brain will be incorporated into a robotic body,” he says. “It could grant humanity a kind of immortality and also make us redefine what a human is.”
The U.S. Department of Defense is sponsoring research along these lines to help amputees injured in war, and the Army is investigating exoskeletons to give soldiers superstrength and resilience. Are cyborg soldiers with machine-enhanced strength, endurance, and vision on the drawing board too?
In a few generations, Nicolelis speculates, brain implants will be as socially acceptable as breast implants are today. “Implants will happen in normals when there is a benefit and they are safe,” he states. He agrees with others that the technology will shape the evolution of Homo sapiens, and his perspective is unmistakably philosophical.
Today, he says, we are all in a sense locked-in, but we won’t be for long. “With these experiments we’ve accomplished something that nobody has noticed yet: We have freed the brain from the body. We have created a profound new paradigm for the brain—and not just the disabled brain—to enact its will without the limitations of the biological machinery that we call a body.
“My children probably will see the day when they can sit physically on a beautiful beach in Brazil but at the same time control a rover on Mars, experience Mars,” Nicolelis reflects. “Their bodies will be here, but their brains will be free.”
Reading Minds From the Outside
To tap into the brain activity of his subjects, Klaus-Robert Müller, a computer scientist at the Technical University of Berlin, does not need to get inside their heads. He just gives each a cap that is embedded with electrodes and stuck to the scalp using conductive gel. Instead of collecting signals from direct contact with neurons, as Philip Kennedy and others do, Müller captures the cacophony of thousands of brain cells chiming in together, recorded noninvasively from the outside of the skull.
Müller uses a computer to track brain waves through a technology known as electroencephalography, or EEG. One especially useful EEG signal, named the P300, registers the brain’s reaction to a novel event or a flash of recognition. Here’s how it works: Subjects wearing an EEG “hat” stare at a computer screen as letters are essentially illuminated one by one. Their brains issue a P300 when and only when a desired letter appears. Using computer software programmed to recognize the P300, the paralyzed can be trained to “type” with the power of the brain alone.
For basic communication for the severely disabled, this system seems best to Jonathan R. Wolpaw, chief of the Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health in Albany. Wolpaw has shown that a P300-based device could help patients with advanced ALS communicate at a rate of one to four words a minute. When the technology has been fully developed, he hopes, the locked-in “should be able to move a cursor someplace” and perform useful operations, “just as we do when using a computer mouse.”
