MONKEY BUSINESS: Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis and his colleagues pave the way for real-time direct interfaces between the brain and electromechanical devices that could be used to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injury or disease.
Image: Courtesy of Cristobal Corral Vega
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In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.
The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain's motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells' responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya's legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted in real time from their lab in Durham, N.C., to control the commands of a five-foot-tall humanoid robot (see video here) in Kyoto, Japan.
"We can read signals from cortical areas…the motor and sensory areas of the brain that are involved in the generation of the motor program to walk," says Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis. "And we are able to read these signals, decode them, and send them to a device…a bipedal robot that actually starts walking like a monkey."
Through the electrodes implanted in Idoya's brain, researchers found that certain neurons in several regions fire at different phases and frequencies, depending on their role in the complex, multimuscle motor process. During the experiment, the robot continued to move for several minutes after Idoya stopped strolling on her treadmill, indicating that her neural impulses were controlling the metal man's limbs. "She was certainly thinking about the same thing as when she was walking," Nicolelis says. "If she was thinking about grasping bananas, we wouldn't get the same patterns."
The goal of Nicolelis and his colleagues is to pave the way for real-time direct interfaces between a brain and electronic and mechanical devices that could be used to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injury or disease. "Our hope is that one day soon," Nicolelis and his former postdoctoral fellow Sidarta Ribeiro wrote in a December 2006 Scientific American article entitled "Seeking the Neural Code," "we will also master sufficient syntax to talk back to the brain, which would allow us, for example, to build a human prosthetic arm laden with sensors to send tactile feedback into the somatosensory cortex of its user."
The experiment in monkey-to-robotic motion culminates years of studying the primate brain's ability to stimulate robotic arms via neural signals. In 2000 Nicolelis and his colleagues described how they had reliably translated the raw electrical brain activity of an owl monkey named Belle into signals that successfully directed the actions of robotic arms based both at Duke and at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab 600 miles (965 kilometers) away in Cambridge, Mass. Belle's tiny hand moved a joystick left or right to correspond with a horizontal series of lights on a display panel in a Duke lab; both robot arms followed suit.
A few years later, in 2005, Nicolelis and his team listened in on brain signals generated by a rhesus monkey named Aurora using a joystick to play a video game and translated them into commands for a mechanical arm to duplicate the motions. Aurora was ultimately able to move a robotic arm sans the joystick, using only her thoughts, an experiment that Nicolelis says addressed "fundamental questions about how brain circuits operate."
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10 Comments
Add CommentIts really interesting to note how patterns of neuronal activity of a Monkey can be studied and findings can be implied in paralysis patient
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, it's interesting. Unfortunately it's very interesting.b It's too bad they need to cut open the monkey's head to monitor the firing and then kill him when they are done with the experiment. They treat them like they aren't even living thinking beings... like they are just disposable commodities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe findings are great but if we were disposing of human primates in this way, people would think very differently about the worth of such research. The cost should not be life.
The Bible says once Israel comes into being that a generation, 70 years, would not "pass" until all the signs of Christs' return takes place. These include, eclipses, grand earthquakes, 100 lb hail--megacryometeors--a star falling into our ocean--Sedna, our waters turning to blood, becoming bitter--wormwood--and Christ return- shining brighter than the sun with a celestial city the size of America coming out of the heavens on a cloud, with fire going before him. "The stars will go black"--supernova, the moon turn "red"--lunar eclipses and our sun to go "dark"-- "before that great and notable day". Get to know the invisible Jesus now before its too late, you will meet him face to face in all his glory=light-- & power=fire. The Bible says God is light and their is no darkness in Him at all. The black hole model can not work. See GRB060614. Israel is 60 years old. Revelations predicts a final 7 years for Earth after we see these celestial signs. The seas will be on fire, the heavens melt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHoly Crap! Where in the hell did that come from?
[pun intended
]
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnnyeD,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCretin, learn how to spell. Those predictions expired 2008-33+4-30 years ago; the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem was even also later than GIiberish said. The profesy is dead.
http://google.com/groups?q=Autymn+fast-food
Misspelling prophecy.. irony or just funny?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-c- is itself one of many misspellings and misspeakings sanctioned by the standard muttish ye call "English", whereas English has been dead for 1000 years after the Norman Conquest, whereafter ye thrive on a mushroom-zombi-lik slauhtering of English, Latin, and Hellènic, and every other foreign tongu, wherein wrong becomes wriht and wriht wrong. Muttish-speakkrs live in a blind, deaf, dumb, and numb spot where they cannot see their own bullshit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs another exempl, you used a gerund (misspelling) and then the object, which is gibberish, or mishmash of two nouns, but you can't think to frame the proper (English) infinitive or prospective case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo matter how hard you try, you still don't seem smart to me. Sorry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLanguage evolves just like most things. Just FYI.
It decays when the crafters die out. What youseems is junk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this--
Edited by lysdexia at 03/29/2008 4:35 AM