“We Can Rebuild Him…”
This is going in the opposite direction from the ‘brain-in-a-jar’ ideal, but cyborgs are neat too:
Scientists have for the first time developed a brain implant that allows people to control electronic devices by thought alone, it emerged yesterday.
The remarkable breakthrough offers hope that people who are paralysed will one day be able to independently operate artificial limbs, computers or wheelchairs. The implant, called BrainGate, allowed Matthew Nagle, a 25-year-old Massachusetts man who has been paralysed from the neck down since 2001, to control a cursor on a screen and to open and close the hand on a prosthetic limb just by thinking about the relevant actions.
The movements were his first since he was stabbed five years ago. The attack severed his spinal cord.
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The BrainGate system uses a 4mm-square electronic chip, called the neuromotor prosthesis, inserted into the motor cortex of the brain, the area that controls voluntary movement.
The chip has 100 electrodes, each thinner than a single human hair, which penetrate 1mm into the surface of the brain, where they pick up the electrical activity of the cells. The resulting signals are fed into a computer, which interprets the meaning in real time and then controls objects such as artificial limbs, computer cursors or wheelchairs.