The Miracles of Science

Did anyone catch 60 Minutes last night? I saw what was, perhaps, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. One of the segments was about the advances being made in measuring the neuron path of movement-thoughts. To way over-simplify it; your brain sends electrical impulses throughout your body to create movement. You see a pen in front of you, you think about picking it up, your brain sends those thoughts to the muscles in your arm and you pick up the pen, all of which, of course, happens in a split second. People who lose limbs often talk about "phantom limbs" which is your brain not recognizing there is no limb. Your brain isn't damaged when you lose an arm, so the impulses are still there. Science has already known which area of the brain motor skills are found, so all we had to do was determine which neurons caused which movements, and we can begin to use the brain to recreate those movements. They have developed something called brain-computer interface, or BCI which does just this. Its still in early stages of testing, but basically, they can hook a computer up to your brain and your brain can control a mouse. This of course gives you control of a computer, which with you can control nearly everything from the lights in a room, to the TV, and even wheel chairs! Imagine the possibilities!

They've also extended this research into bionics. They took a monkey and determined which neurons were firing at the precise time of individual movements. They then developed a robot arm that could duplicate these movements and interfaced it to the monkeys brain. They restrained the arms of the monkey and with a little training, taught him to use the robotic arm to get the food they placed in front of him. I'm sure with a few more years of technology and development, we will begin to see bionics used in day to day life.

They are already working on a way to reverse the signal. This means, not only will we be able to use our brain to operate a prosthetic limb, but we will also be able to use that limb to send signals to our brain, such as temperature and pressure. Its truly amazing!

Here's some videos!