The work is a step toward enabling people to use thought to control a cursor, while surfing the Internet, reading e-mail or performing other functions via a computer interface, researchers say.

"I suppose you could do anything a computer could do, including control devices like light switches and other things," Brown University graduate student and researcher Mijail Serruya told NewsFactor.

Fellow researcher Liam Paninski, a former Brown undergraduate now at New York University, told NewsFactor that thought-control work may lead to the use of brain signals to control prosthetics.

"By extension, we expect that we should be able to replace a damaged human arm with a prosthetic device controlled by these kinds of neural-decoded signals," Paninksi told NewsFactor.

Mind over Matter

For the experiment, the researchers implanted a wired device about the size of a fingernail in the brains of three Rhesus monkeys. Using a tiny array of electrodes, the team was able to record, interpret and reconstruct the brain activity that controls hand movement.

Although the monkeys still used their hands to play a simple pinball video game, the cursor movement actually was achieved through a series of mathematical formulas called liner filters, which created a model that related the firing of neurons to the cursor's movement.

"We substituted thought control for hand control," said John Donoghue, chair of Brown's Department of Neuroscience and senior researcher in the project. "A monkey's brain, not its hand, moved the cursor."

According to Donoghue, use of a reconstructed signal to allow the brain to perform immediate, complex, goal-directed tasks has not been accomplished before.

"We showed we could build a signal that works right away, in real-time. And we can do it recording from as few as six neurons," he said.

Simple Signal

The researchers pointed out that similar work with paralyzed patients already has been done using control signals that are "similar in spirit." However, one of the biggest findings of the recent brain-control cursor research is that minimal brainpower is required to elicit movement on the screen.

"We learned you don't have to link to millions and millions of cells to get a useful control signal out," Serruya told NewsFactor.

Serruya said it would be a fairly simple engineering problem to make the implants wireless, likening the process to going from a standard telephone to a wireless one. (continued...)

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