The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

Nicolelis and Chapin hoped their work would help patients with various kinds of paralysis. That happened in July 2006, when a team led by neuroscientist John Donoghue, from Brown University, used a similar technique with a human being. The twenty-five-year-old man, Matthew Nagle, had been stabbed in the neck and paralyzed in all four limbs by the resulting spinal cord injury. A tiny, painless silicone chip with a hundred electrodes was implanted in his brain and attached to a computer. After four days of practice he was able to move a computer cursor on a screen, open e-mail, adjust the channel and volume control on a television, play a computer game, and control a robotic arm using his thoughts. Patients with muscular dystrophy, strokes, and motor-neuron disease are scheduled to try the thought-translation device next. The goal in these approaches is ultimately to implant a small microelectrode array, with batteries and a transmitter the size of a baby’s fingernail, in the motor cortex. A small computer could be connected either to a robotic arm or wire-lessly to a wheelchair control or to electrodes implanted in muscles to trigger movements. Some scientists hope to develop a technology less invasive than microelectrodes to detect neuronal firing—possibly a variant of TMS, or a device Taub and colleagues are developing to detect changes in brain waves.