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Imagine: you woke up in the morning, looked at the kettle, started boiling water, thought of a friend and sent him a message mentally. This one immediately appeared in front of him, he sang a melody in his head and he became available for listening on your smartphone – which, for various reasons, were paralyzed, were able to control their members at the same time. 39, help devices receiving a "mental signal". That sounds fantastic, is not it? But the road to this fantastic future is already built by major global companies that are developing the latest neuro-computer interfaces.
Fast forward in early January 2019. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla, who sold some of their Facebook shares for $ 30 million, funded their own project, The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The project has already raised more than $ 5 billion for several years and its goal is to treat all diseases in one generation only.
As an independent, non-profit organization, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative provides grants to interdisciplinary groups of scientists with a wide variety of scientific interests. At present, the initiative has launched the Biohab Chan-Zuckerberg project (Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub). The project is also led by renowned scientists from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at San Francisco.
Project participants are currently using to create a neural computer interface that can be used to treat people with spinal cord injuries or other diseases causing paralysis. The researchers claim that the device being developed, which they call Wand (can be translated as "magic wand" or "magic wand"), can also be used to treat diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinsonism, affecting the transmission of nerve impulses in the brain.
The device under development has even been tested on primates. Before each movement of the monkeys, the device implanted in the motor zone of the cerebral cortex read the nerve impulses and generated a signal wirelessly transmitted to the researchers' computers, and they knew that the monkey would now perform some sort of action. Thus, it has been shown that Wand can read signals from the motor zone of the cerebral cortex. Thus, these signals can be sent to any gadget to interact with it.
In addition, by sending certain signals to the neuro-computer interface, researchers could interrupt any movement of laboratory animals as they wish. In this way, it is possible to suppress excess pathological excesses that appear in various diseases, such as epilepsy.
Three years ago, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, neuroscientists proved that this approach worked well. During their experiments, they not only studied in detail the impulses born in the motor zone of the cerebral cortex of the primate during the movement of the legs, but went further.
When we want to move a hand or a foot, limb impulses move from the motor zone of the cortex of our brain, through the main nervous "trunk" – the spinal cord. In the case where the spinal cord is damaged, the impulses do not reach the desired limb and it is paralyzed. What did the researchers in Lausanne do?
A group of monkeys had the cuts of the spine cut in half so that they had the hind leg paralyzed. After that, a device that reads the signal from a part of the central computer interface installed on the motor part of the cerebral cortex was inserted into the area of the spinal cord, causing the lesion (in which the pulses brain did not reach). In addition, this signal was sent through the spinal cord to the paralyzed limb. As a result, when the device was turned on, the monkey could walk, move and squeeze the leg, which previously could not even move slightly. When the device was turned off, the member again lost all its features. This study can be found in the video below.
If you look at the big picture, we've been living for a long time with cyborg using neuro-computer interfaces. Cochlear implants that capture the sound and transmit it to the encrusted parts in the inner ear make hearing for those who are hard of hearing. Argus II retinal prostheses (also known as bionic eyes) allow people with blindness to see something for over five years.
Last year, BrainGate neuro-computer interface allowed three patients with paralysis of the arms and legs (quadriplegia) to mentally smash text messages on the tablet, open various programs (for example, courier services), place orders in online stores and even play the virtual piano via the app. To do this, people from certain areas of the cerebral cortex have introduced a microchip the size of a small tablet.
No less interesting studies are conducted by other organizations. For example, the neuralink neural technology company, founded by Ilon Mask, is developing a neurocomputer interface, called neuralink (which can be translated as "neuralgauge"). According to Ilona Musk, thanks to Neuralink, many diseases of the nervous system could be cured and by 2030, even healthy people with this device can improve. For example, a paralyzed person may wear a robotic exoskeleton suit, which will be controlled by mental cues. And how do you get the idea of downloading the necessary information (or even the skills) directly into the brain? Neuralink will connect us with computers.
If Ilona Mask fails, the others will succeed. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects, or DARPA, are spending tens of millions of dollars to support companies developing advanced neuro-computer interfaces.
We do not know what will happen, but one thing is certain: our future will certainly not be boring!
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