The Brain Electric by Malcolm Gay

Author:Malcolm Gay [Gay, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7. FEELING THE LIGHT

“Ninety-nine percent of the field is trying to control upper limbs. These guys are obsessed because that’s the only thing they know how to do,” Miguel Nicolelis said while seated in his office at Duke University’s leafy medical school campus. “That’s the same thing we did in 2000. It happens a lot in science: there is one idea, and everyone tries to follow that idea. Our lab creates these ideas—many, all at once. Our idea is to go way beyond that.”

It was the summer of 2012, and outside Nicolelis’s window construction crews were noisily erecting a new glass-and-steel structure amid the hilly campus’s evergreens and oaks. Inside his office, however, the neuroscientist was thinking about soccer. That year’s Brazilian team was being compared to the storied team of 1970, which under the likes of Carlos Alberto and Pelé was perfect during its World Cup victory. The team was playing in the Euro cup, and Nicolelis was planning to stay up late to see the game, which he’d been previewing on his iPad.

Nicolelis first developed his passion for soccer as a child in Brazil, where he studied medicine before immigrating to the States to work with the physiologist John Chapin. In the summer of 2012, however, Nicolelis was thinking about soccer in an entirely different way. Namely, he was working with an international team of scientists to build a full-body, brain-controlled exoskeleton. The plan, as Nicolelis envisioned it, would be for a quadriplegic to don the exoskeleton during the opening ceremonies of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Rising from a wheelchair, he or she would use the exoskeleton to walk to center field and kick a soccer ball before the first match. “The opening kick would be a demonstration that science can almost do the impossible—make someone walk again,” he said. “It would be the only soccer game in Brazilian history where nobody remembers the result of the game because they would be more fascinated by what happens at the opening.”

To that end, Nicolelis had devoted several bays in his vast monkey lab to what he calls the Walk Again Project, which he believed would move the field beyond upper-limb prosthetics to enable full-body control. Nicolelis and his collaborators were working to expand the recording capacity of their electrodes, moving beyond the Utah array and instead implanting research animals with hundreds of electrodes across multiple brain regions. “We need 141 degrees of freedom for that exoskeleton to be fully operational—legs, arms, fingers, everything. You don’t do that with two hundred neurons,” he said. “Once you start getting ten thousand or twenty thousand neurons recorded simultaneously—this is going to change the game. Because you’re not talking about seven degrees of freedom: you’re talking about tens of degrees of freedom.”

A short walk across campus, Nicolelis’s monkey lab is a testament to the scientist’s success. The one-story building is clad in iconic Duke stone—a rough-hewn slatelike material flecked with blues, tans, and rusts quarried in nearby Hillsborough, North Carolina. Whereas

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