When real brains operate in the real world, it’s a two-way street. Electrical activity in the brain’s motor cortex speeds down the spinal cord to the part of the body to be moved; tactile sensations from the skin simultaneously zip through the spinal cord and into the brain’s somatosensory cortex. The two actions are virtually inseparable: absent the feel of a floor under your feet, it’s awfully difficult to walk properly, and lacking the tactile sensation of a coffee mug, your brain cannot sense how tightly your fingers should grasp it. Until now, attempts to help paralyzed patients move a prosthetic have addressed only half of our interaction with the world. A new study offers hope of expanding that capacity.

Scientists led by Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, have reported the first-ever demonstration in which a primate brain not only moved a “virtual body” (an avatar hand on a computer screen) but also received electric signals encoding the feel of virtual objects the avatar touched—and did so clearly enough to texturally distinguish the objects. If the technology, detailed in the journal Nature, works in people, it would change the lives of paralyzed patients. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They would not only be able to walk and move their arms and hands, Nicolelis says, but also to feel the texture of objects they hold or touch and to sense the terrain they tread on.

Other research groups are working on similar advances. At the University of Pittsburgh, neuroscientists led by Andrew Schwartz have begun recruiting patients paralyzed by spinal cord injury into a similar trial that would allow them to “feel” the environment around them thanks to electrodes in the somatosensory cortex that receive information from a robot arm.

Nicolelis hopes to bring his research to fruition by 2014, when he plans to unveil the first “wearable robot” at the opening game of soccer’s World Cup in his home country of Brazil. Think Iron Man, a full-body, exoskeletonlike prosthetic. Its interface will be controlled by neural implants that capture signals from the motor cortex to move legs, hands, fingers and everything else. And it will be studded with sensors that relay tactile information about the outside world to the somatosensory cortex. Buoyed by the advances so far, Nicolelis predicts that the device will be ready in time. “It’s our moon shot,” he says.

This article was originally published with the title Can't Touch This Feeling.

5 Comments

1. 1. ParrotSlave 01:13 AM 11/10/11

   You should have been more careful with your headline. It sounds like you are stating that he demonstrated telekinesis in monkeys. To most people it would be obvious that a brain-machine interface is involved, but I will guarantee that, here and there in the netherland of the internet, your headline is going to be used to "prove" that Scientific American published an article verifying that monkeys have telekinetic abilities.

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2. 2. vmfenimore 06:56 AM 11/10/11

   Too funny. I read the headline and it sounded like telekinesis to me. I knew that could not be right because it would be much bigger news and clicked on the article to find out. Perhaps what has been proven is that Scientific American uses sensationalistic journalism.

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3. 3. dkephart 07:45 AM 11/10/11

   There is a more mundane interpretation. The headline could mean the truism that the brain is used by primates in touching and moving objects. Since it must be _news_ I, too, thought "Telekinesis? !" This is probably a case of unintentional sensationalism, at worst, since "...using robotic arm and special processing software" wouldn't fit so nively on a headline. Hopefully no-one put an unmerciful interpretation on the closing quote of the article.

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4. 4. donnawanna 08:02 PM 12/7/11

   No animals were hurt...

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5. 5. verdai 07:39 PM 1/3/12

   We'll get that too.
   Meanwhile, O Lord, deliver me.

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