we’re going to talk about a pivotal
moment that we’re at in the history of
neuroscience in the history of science
really because scientists are helping to
decipher what you could arguably say is
the most complex structure in the
universe when I was still a tenured
professor now I’m just a mere mortal
when I was still a tenured professor at
Caltech and I could leap over tall
buildings I was my main pursuit was
studying consciousness the neill basis
of consciousness and in particular I
felt the best way to pursue that was to
work on theoretical ideas but also to
pursue experiments in inhuman because if
there’s one thing we know for certain
about about consciousness is that most
of us are conscious most of the time in
order to understand anything about the
brain in ultimately about psychology we
have to understand nuance we know a lot
about nerve cells in post mortem in dead
brains and of course in animals but
there’s are there occasion when you can
actually listen in to the way neurons
talk to each other and that’s doing your
surgery so in some subset of patients
that have epileptic seizures when
there’s an idea that if you can locate
from the the place in the brain from
which the seizure originates and if you
can then surgically remove that force I
then this then in many cases the
depending on the type of epileptic
seizure the the seizures will go away on
some patient you don’t you can’t locate
it from the outside so then what the
neurosurgeon does implants up to twelve
micro electrodes into the patient’s head
and so you can essentially triangle it
when the patient has a seizure you can
triangulate and then you can pinpoint
where the Siege originates so now in
principle we can listen to individual
neurons and I say listen because the way
they talk to each other is he’s sending
out these brief electrical pulses called
action potential or spikes you can put
them on a monitor and you can actually
listen to them so these are actually
neurons nerve cells in a brain of a
patient that are chatting to each other
we don’t we’re only beginning to
understand the code that they used to
talk to each other but we can pick up
this signal in and it’s very similar in
animals so the patient is constant
you can do all sorts of games with the
patient and all you can show him or her
images so what we did we probed and we
showed different things to the patient
because we wanted to uncover what is the
trigger what turns these individual
neurons on see here what you can see we
show this image of a spider of an animal
of the Eiffel Tower of a bunch of Kobe
Bryant of a bunch of other famous people
in here of an actress called Jennifer
Aniston some of you may know it she’s a
famous Hollywood actress but now if you
show images of Jennifer Aniston the
neuron will respond very reliable on
each trial the neon didn’t respond at
the time she was married to another
famous act actor and and the neon didn’t
respond to that this is now in textbook
ins called Jennifer Aniston yawns so the
idea said they’re new things that you’re
very familiar with like actresses or
actors politicians your spouse your kids
your workers your car your dog anything
that you see again and again your brain
abstract and represents by by a bunch of
neurons not one it’s not this isn’t just
one Jennifer Aniston and there may be
10,000 or maybe more neurons that
respond relative specifically to
Jennifer Aniston and so idea is this
tells us something about the about the
way neurons the things that neurons care
about so in this high level part of the
brain they care about things that we
care about it’s not surprising I mean we
care about abstract things like people
in the relationship and or like idea a
concept things like justice or democracy
or Malika Afghanistan all those things
and there will be groups of neurons that
very specifically respond to that when
you think about those things so you can
do a lot of research on at that level so
this is a new one here you have it’s
it’s sort of input region this is called
the dendrite in red and then here at the
cell body there’s a lot of electric
machinery that we understand quite well
it generates this action with this pulse
when it’s sufficiently excited and then
it sends out that pulse onto the wire
this is the output wire it’s very
complicated and every time there’s a
connection is indicated in yellow and
that’s a sign apps so synapse or synapse
is it’s a contact point between two
neurons and how much one neuron
influence influence
next new one it’s encoded in the
strength of that synapse and all the
evidence shows that the the memory like
the memory of my first kiss or the
memory that I know what Julius Caesar
said when he was you know when he was
killed by his friend Brutus all that
sort of memory is encoded in the
strength of billions of finances that
constitute memory and that also
ultimately give rise to consciousness
the feeling of something I what really
gives rise to thought and consciousness
memories is the cerebral cortex cerebral
cortex is really a sheet it’s a pizza
it’s pretty much think of it a pizza
that’s two to three millimeter thick
pretty much like my vest here to the
three millimeter it’s this size we’ve
got two of them but they’re highly
folded and this is a computational
tissue that evolution invented roughly
200 million years ago it’s common to all
mammals and it gives rise to our
identity who we are our feelings our
memory our our our sense of cells and we
at the Allen Institute many many other
scientists are trying to understand what
what is a universal were to see sort of
the the algorithm what is the
computation that’s performed within this
dense forest of 100 billion neurons a
hundred billion trees that give rise to
all of this so now what we’re going to
do we’re going to zoom in in this last
movie I’ll show you we’re going to zoom
in onto one piece’
or sliver here that’s incredible thin it
turns out for those you know what number
is 12 micrometer in thickness that’s
that maybe a tenth of the width of a
human hair so very very thin but we’re
going to zoom in in great great detail
because the more we look the more
details we we see I show this because
the one thing that that that that you
confronted with is overwhelming
complexity each new generation of
measurement techniques of microscopes
reveals more and more and more
complexity it has to be complex because
ultimately has to give rise to this
subtlety of the human mind so what we’ll
see here is a piece of cortex from the
mouse brain he again it’s one of those
neurons just like the one you show
before you’ll see a whole bunch of them
so we’re going to take a tip with cool
music that starts up here and that goes
slowly down here and it visualized every
single sign up so what you’re going to
see a three colors you’ll see I mean
you’ll see in high detail you see
magenta each magenta puncta each point
to sign apps as I said there in this
piece there there’s going to be a couple
of billion sign up says green is a
subset of the of one particular type of
neuron and my end and be the blue color
you see it’s tubulin it’s its dendrites
and axons of of other neurons this is
one millimeter again so that the
millimeter is half the size of the width
of a grain of rice all right and now
so the most lame
the common laboratory mouse
the size of the brain is roughly a sugar
cube and that’s why we assume in so just
remember they that the magenta the
synapse is the green is one set of
neurons they happen to be called layer
five for the experts and blues tubulin
that shows that shows a wiring of axons
and now we’ll go through this cortex
a good evening so you might think after
seeing that movie that it’s hopeless
that we could never understand anything
about something so complicated so what
what I want to do is to say that that in
fact we have learned enough not only to
understand some fundamental things about
how the brain works but also to
intervene in ways where we can restore
lost functions and I want to give you
just two examples of the kinds of things
that we can do because of our
understanding of the brain so the first
one is one in which we’re a technology
we have is going to allow us allows us
to write into the brain to actually do
something to transform the brain bite by
intervening in brain circuits so let me
just explain so so every day when you
move around your brain is working to
produce movements and there’s a very
important chemical in your brain called
dopamine that comes from the bottom of
the brain in the brainstem and it comes
up and basically dopamine is OHS doll
over your brain in many areas that sort
of your brain is taking a bath and
dopamine in some cases the dopamine
neurons degenerate they died in fact in
all of us we lose a little bit as we age
but if these neurons die the circuits
don’t work properly and you get
something that James Parkinson described
in 1817 as those shaking palsy and what
happens here is you can see this lady
who has lost many of her dopamine
neurons she has the shaking palsy you
have a tremor you can’t move your rigid
and you have a difficulty initiating
movement it’s a severely debilitating
disease and it’s because of the loss of
dopamine that we can’t put dopamine back
in the brain very well we can there are
some pills but it doesn’t work
exceptionally well in all cases but what
we can do is we can put a stimulating
electrode about the size of a small soda
straw that has the ability to
electrically stimulate at the end and we
can by turning on this stimulator we can
tickle these brain circuits and make
them act as if they had dopamine back
again so they work again and as a
consequence we have a very remarkable
result when we turn on this stimulation
so here is the same lady after the
electrical stimulation has been turned
you can see the shaking the tremor the
rigidity is gone and this is an amazing
reawakening of these motor circuits
they’re no longer held slave to this
disruption that’s there with the lack of
dopamine this kind of intervention in
brain circuits to rebalance or what we
call neuromodulation modulating these
brain circuits back to normal is now
being tried in a large number of other
disorders and as far ranging as dementia
Alzheimer’s disease imagine now we could
bring that circuit back into control so
that instead of having cognitive decline
you could allow a person to retain their
memory throughout life instead of losing
it as happens with with Alzheimer’s
disease
so the second disorder I want to tell
you about is the loss of the ability to
move paralysis and there are a large
number of ways that you can become
paralyzed and there are that basically
cuts off a brain that functions from the
body so let’s just sort of see what
happens when you move so basically when
you’re thinking about planning to say
pick up a pen and jot down a phone
number or take some notes here your
brain many areas of your brain
collaborate together and work to produce
a plan and that plan is turned into
action and it largely engages this one
important area called the motor cortex
it’s a strip that runs from the top of
your head down to your cheekbone about
an inch wide or so and if you’re
thinking about jotting down a note to
control your arm there’s a region at
about the middle third of this area that
controls your arm and that sends out a
bundle of fibers these axons it’s a
compact bundle about the size of a
pencil lid that has a million of these
fibers it runs down through the
brainstem and down into your spinal cord
and it’s the requisite pathway it’s the
important pathway to send commands from
your brain to move out to your muscles
so for example if you were to have a
spinal cord injury that would interrupt
this path you would be paralyzed you
couldn’t move your arms and legs if it
was the whole path destroyed you would
think about moving but nothing would
happen
we call that tetraplegia and even more
devastating damage can happen with
destruction in the brainstem where it
still interrupts the pathways but
because it’s higher up in the brain it
not only will
to a person tetraplegic they cannot
speak and sometimes they can’t move at
all in the worst condition we call that
a locked-in syndrome they could only
move their eyes up and down and that’s
it so I’m going to tell you about two
people Kathy Hutchinson who had a
brainstem stroke about 15 years before
this picture was taken when she was
sitting on her couch
she was completely locked in for a while
and then was able to move her face and
eyes and head but not able to speak any
longer and not able to move and Matt
Nagel had a spinal cord injury when he
was involved in the fight and the knife
went into his neck and severed his
spinal cord and so he can talk and he
could move his head but he cannot move
his body at all and what I’m going to
tell you about is the project which we
call brain gate but it’s a kind of brain
computer interface our attempt to take
signals from the motor cortex take them
outside the body and allow people to run
machines and control devices to free
them up to give them independence and
control again and what we do is we’ve
created this electrode array that is
implanted in the armor of your motor
cortex now the electrode array is a tiny
baby aspirin sized implant and it has a
lot of these little prongs sticking out
these are electrodes that are actually
inserted into the cortex to get up close
to these neurons that you just saw and
the reason we have to put this into the
brain is the action potentials the
spikes the electrical impulses that come
out of individual neurons only go a very
short distance so in order for us to
listen in to those impulses we have to
put electrodes up very close but those
impulses are the message of movement so
what I’m going to do is let you listen
in to a recording in which a technician
is telling in this case it’s Kathy he’s
telling her to imagine opening and
closing your hand and you’ll hear the
spikes
changed their firing rate so it’ll get
higher and lower and you could hear that
there’s in fact a code they’re high
means that there’s the hand is open and
low means the hand is closed so just
listen in for a second all right
opening your hand
relax close your on see it shuts off
relax open hand
so this is the basis of the device that
we’ve created not only recording from
one cell but taking the pattern of many
many neurons and trying to relate what
the person is thinking about to what’s
something in the real world will do and
this is the setup that we have the
person has this electrode array
implanted in their arm area motor cortex
we have now in this rather crude
primitive version because it’s just an
early stage version they have a plug in
their head the electronics are connected
by a cable that amplifies those little
tiny signals takes them through a
computer and the computer basically
counts up and measures those spikes and
tries to figure out well that means up
or that means open or that means close
and what I’m going to do is show you
some videos that that show what the
patients have been able to do of course
we were very excited and we asked Matt
you know to do a whole bunch of things
here he’s going to draw a circle and
then he’s going to tell us what it’s
like to be able to control something so
he’s controlling that cursor with his
thoughts and this is actually the
world’s first art I think were neroli
drawn circle oh oh man I can’t put it
into words it’s just I used my brain I
just thought it I said Cursi go up to
top right it said and now I could
control him it all over the screen it’s
wild actually this is you know he was
using his consciousness to manipulate
his neurons but he actually didn’t
really understand what was going on
there something happens when you think
and it’s manifest as those spike changes
but what’s really going on is the
mystery so he hadn’t moved anything at a
long time so we were able to get this
prosthetic hand and it doesn’t really do
anything it’s just a motorized hand that
can open and close so we ran a brain
command into it and told him tell us
what you’re doing and imagine opening
and closing that hand and you’re going
to hear his reaction to the first time
he’s moved something in a couple of
years because remember he’s completely
paralyzed and you’ll listen to his a
strong reaction
so just if you missed that he really
became a star by doing these things now
of course those aren’t very practical
actions and what we really want to do is
to enable people to do things that are
meaningful and for people like Kathy who
can’t speak communication is extremely
important so my colleague Leigh Hochberg
and others in our group have created you
know if you can move a cursor you can
choose words on a screen instead of
using a keyboard which you have to move
a cursor all over the screen we made a
radial keyboard with word prediction and
this is actually Kathy spelling out a
sentence so just to show that she could
use the spelling interface to convey
messages but we’d really like to see
something even more sophisticated to do
things that you can’t she can’t do she
can’t do things with her arms so here
Kathy is controlling a robot arm and
we’re doing something simple we just
elevated these little foam balls and
told her to reach out and grab them and
because of our ability to make some
sense of the way the arm is coded in
reaching space she was able to do that
so what we did is we said let’s do
something practical and meaningful for
you and so we gave her her morning
coffee and we said okay Kathy for the
first time in 15 years you’re going to
feed yourself your morning coffee and
not have to rely on another person to
come in to do that so here she is with
the control of the robotic arm on her
own taking her first drink of coffee we
found out in the afternoon she actually
sometimes had Kahlua in the coffee as
well of course they only use it in a
research setting so far what we want to
do is make it available all the time and
in fact what we really want to do and
really strive to do over the coming
decades is to be able to take a person
who can’t move and reanimate their own
muscles to really create a physical
nervous system where their biological
one is irreparable so here’s an example
of what we’re aiming to do
the idea here is that there’s an
implanted array it generates signals it
comes down to something like a smart
pack on your on your belt oh s— like a
cell phone that then communicates to an
electric nervous system and it activates
a stimulator which then stimulates the
nerves and causes the muscles to
activate so it’s what your nervous
system normally does but it’s all done
with physical components and the next
one of the next important steps is to
create something that is a basically a
smartphone inside the head and my
colleague Arturo Rico has created this
device which is something that will
allow us to wirelessly transmit all of
those complex brain signals outside and
here in now nice bloodless surgery done
in a kitchen no less the there’s the
implant the the transmitter sits
underneath the skin and it transmits all
that information out and this is not in
humans yet but it will be in the next
coming years but has been tested in
animals and this is feasible now it has
more sophistication than what you have
in your cell phone to be able to
communicate be able to tell us what’s
going on and to get that information to
the outside so this is coming the
ability to rewire the nervous system and
I asked Kathy to send me a note about
what does it mean what would she like to
do again and so she sent me this note
she typed it out I would love to garden
again I really miss gardening canning
and cooking I also wanted to be able to
hold a book with both hands or even a
robot arm
I really hope someday I’ll be able to
use my voice I can handle paralysis but
lack of communication is torture thank
you so I would say thanks thanks to them
these brief patients and thank you I
think I’ll conclude with that
you
moment that we’re at in the history of
neuroscience in the history of science
really because scientists are helping to
decipher what you could arguably say is
the most complex structure in the
universe when I was still a tenured
professor now I’m just a mere mortal
when I was still a tenured professor at
Caltech and I could leap over tall
buildings I was my main pursuit was
studying consciousness the neill basis
of consciousness and in particular I
felt the best way to pursue that was to
work on theoretical ideas but also to
pursue experiments in inhuman because if
there’s one thing we know for certain
about about consciousness is that most
of us are conscious most of the time in
order to understand anything about the
brain in ultimately about psychology we
have to understand nuance we know a lot
about nerve cells in post mortem in dead
brains and of course in animals but
there’s are there occasion when you can
actually listen in to the way neurons
talk to each other and that’s doing your
surgery so in some subset of patients
that have epileptic seizures when
there’s an idea that if you can locate
from the the place in the brain from
which the seizure originates and if you
can then surgically remove that force I
then this then in many cases the
depending on the type of epileptic
seizure the the seizures will go away on
some patient you don’t you can’t locate
it from the outside so then what the
neurosurgeon does implants up to twelve
micro electrodes into the patient’s head
and so you can essentially triangle it
when the patient has a seizure you can
triangulate and then you can pinpoint
where the Siege originates so now in
principle we can listen to individual
neurons and I say listen because the way
they talk to each other is he’s sending
out these brief electrical pulses called
action potential or spikes you can put
them on a monitor and you can actually
listen to them so these are actually
neurons nerve cells in a brain of a
patient that are chatting to each other
we don’t we’re only beginning to
understand the code that they used to
talk to each other but we can pick up
this signal in and it’s very similar in
animals so the patient is constant
you can do all sorts of games with the
patient and all you can show him or her
images so what we did we probed and we
showed different things to the patient
because we wanted to uncover what is the
trigger what turns these individual
neurons on see here what you can see we
show this image of a spider of an animal
of the Eiffel Tower of a bunch of Kobe
Bryant of a bunch of other famous people
in here of an actress called Jennifer
Aniston some of you may know it she’s a
famous Hollywood actress but now if you
show images of Jennifer Aniston the
neuron will respond very reliable on
each trial the neon didn’t respond at
the time she was married to another
famous act actor and and the neon didn’t
respond to that this is now in textbook
ins called Jennifer Aniston yawns so the
idea said they’re new things that you’re
very familiar with like actresses or
actors politicians your spouse your kids
your workers your car your dog anything
that you see again and again your brain
abstract and represents by by a bunch of
neurons not one it’s not this isn’t just
one Jennifer Aniston and there may be
10,000 or maybe more neurons that
respond relative specifically to
Jennifer Aniston and so idea is this
tells us something about the about the
way neurons the things that neurons care
about so in this high level part of the
brain they care about things that we
care about it’s not surprising I mean we
care about abstract things like people
in the relationship and or like idea a
concept things like justice or democracy
or Malika Afghanistan all those things
and there will be groups of neurons that
very specifically respond to that when
you think about those things so you can
do a lot of research on at that level so
this is a new one here you have it’s
it’s sort of input region this is called
the dendrite in red and then here at the
cell body there’s a lot of electric
machinery that we understand quite well
it generates this action with this pulse
when it’s sufficiently excited and then
it sends out that pulse onto the wire
this is the output wire it’s very
complicated and every time there’s a
connection is indicated in yellow and
that’s a sign apps so synapse or synapse
is it’s a contact point between two
neurons and how much one neuron
influence influence
next new one it’s encoded in the
strength of that synapse and all the
evidence shows that the the memory like
the memory of my first kiss or the
memory that I know what Julius Caesar
said when he was you know when he was
killed by his friend Brutus all that
sort of memory is encoded in the
strength of billions of finances that
constitute memory and that also
ultimately give rise to consciousness
the feeling of something I what really
gives rise to thought and consciousness
memories is the cerebral cortex cerebral
cortex is really a sheet it’s a pizza
it’s pretty much think of it a pizza
that’s two to three millimeter thick
pretty much like my vest here to the
three millimeter it’s this size we’ve
got two of them but they’re highly
folded and this is a computational
tissue that evolution invented roughly
200 million years ago it’s common to all
mammals and it gives rise to our
identity who we are our feelings our
memory our our our sense of cells and we
at the Allen Institute many many other
scientists are trying to understand what
what is a universal were to see sort of
the the algorithm what is the
computation that’s performed within this
dense forest of 100 billion neurons a
hundred billion trees that give rise to
all of this so now what we’re going to
do we’re going to zoom in in this last
movie I’ll show you we’re going to zoom
in onto one piece’
or sliver here that’s incredible thin it
turns out for those you know what number
is 12 micrometer in thickness that’s
that maybe a tenth of the width of a
human hair so very very thin but we’re
going to zoom in in great great detail
because the more we look the more
details we we see I show this because
the one thing that that that that you
confronted with is overwhelming
complexity each new generation of
measurement techniques of microscopes
reveals more and more and more
complexity it has to be complex because
ultimately has to give rise to this
subtlety of the human mind so what we’ll
see here is a piece of cortex from the
mouse brain he again it’s one of those
neurons just like the one you show
before you’ll see a whole bunch of them
so we’re going to take a tip with cool
music that starts up here and that goes
slowly down here and it visualized every
single sign up so what you’re going to
see a three colors you’ll see I mean
you’ll see in high detail you see
magenta each magenta puncta each point
to sign apps as I said there in this
piece there there’s going to be a couple
of billion sign up says green is a
subset of the of one particular type of
neuron and my end and be the blue color
you see it’s tubulin it’s its dendrites
and axons of of other neurons this is
one millimeter again so that the
millimeter is half the size of the width
of a grain of rice all right and now
so the most lame
the common laboratory mouse
the size of the brain is roughly a sugar
cube and that’s why we assume in so just
remember they that the magenta the
synapse is the green is one set of
neurons they happen to be called layer
five for the experts and blues tubulin
that shows that shows a wiring of axons
and now we’ll go through this cortex
a good evening so you might think after
seeing that movie that it’s hopeless
that we could never understand anything
about something so complicated so what
what I want to do is to say that that in
fact we have learned enough not only to
understand some fundamental things about
how the brain works but also to
intervene in ways where we can restore
lost functions and I want to give you
just two examples of the kinds of things
that we can do because of our
understanding of the brain so the first
one is one in which we’re a technology
we have is going to allow us allows us
to write into the brain to actually do
something to transform the brain bite by
intervening in brain circuits so let me
just explain so so every day when you
move around your brain is working to
produce movements and there’s a very
important chemical in your brain called
dopamine that comes from the bottom of
the brain in the brainstem and it comes
up and basically dopamine is OHS doll
over your brain in many areas that sort
of your brain is taking a bath and
dopamine in some cases the dopamine
neurons degenerate they died in fact in
all of us we lose a little bit as we age
but if these neurons die the circuits
don’t work properly and you get
something that James Parkinson described
in 1817 as those shaking palsy and what
happens here is you can see this lady
who has lost many of her dopamine
neurons she has the shaking palsy you
have a tremor you can’t move your rigid
and you have a difficulty initiating
movement it’s a severely debilitating
disease and it’s because of the loss of
dopamine that we can’t put dopamine back
in the brain very well we can there are
some pills but it doesn’t work
exceptionally well in all cases but what
we can do is we can put a stimulating
electrode about the size of a small soda
straw that has the ability to
electrically stimulate at the end and we
can by turning on this stimulator we can
tickle these brain circuits and make
them act as if they had dopamine back
again so they work again and as a
consequence we have a very remarkable
result when we turn on this stimulation
so here is the same lady after the
electrical stimulation has been turned
you can see the shaking the tremor the
rigidity is gone and this is an amazing
reawakening of these motor circuits
they’re no longer held slave to this
disruption that’s there with the lack of
dopamine this kind of intervention in
brain circuits to rebalance or what we
call neuromodulation modulating these
brain circuits back to normal is now
being tried in a large number of other
disorders and as far ranging as dementia
Alzheimer’s disease imagine now we could
bring that circuit back into control so
that instead of having cognitive decline
you could allow a person to retain their
memory throughout life instead of losing
it as happens with with Alzheimer’s
disease
so the second disorder I want to tell
you about is the loss of the ability to
move paralysis and there are a large
number of ways that you can become
paralyzed and there are that basically
cuts off a brain that functions from the
body so let’s just sort of see what
happens when you move so basically when
you’re thinking about planning to say
pick up a pen and jot down a phone
number or take some notes here your
brain many areas of your brain
collaborate together and work to produce
a plan and that plan is turned into
action and it largely engages this one
important area called the motor cortex
it’s a strip that runs from the top of
your head down to your cheekbone about
an inch wide or so and if you’re
thinking about jotting down a note to
control your arm there’s a region at
about the middle third of this area that
controls your arm and that sends out a
bundle of fibers these axons it’s a
compact bundle about the size of a
pencil lid that has a million of these
fibers it runs down through the
brainstem and down into your spinal cord
and it’s the requisite pathway it’s the
important pathway to send commands from
your brain to move out to your muscles
so for example if you were to have a
spinal cord injury that would interrupt
this path you would be paralyzed you
couldn’t move your arms and legs if it
was the whole path destroyed you would
think about moving but nothing would
happen
we call that tetraplegia and even more
devastating damage can happen with
destruction in the brainstem where it
still interrupts the pathways but
because it’s higher up in the brain it
not only will
to a person tetraplegic they cannot
speak and sometimes they can’t move at
all in the worst condition we call that
a locked-in syndrome they could only
move their eyes up and down and that’s
it so I’m going to tell you about two
people Kathy Hutchinson who had a
brainstem stroke about 15 years before
this picture was taken when she was
sitting on her couch
she was completely locked in for a while
and then was able to move her face and
eyes and head but not able to speak any
longer and not able to move and Matt
Nagel had a spinal cord injury when he
was involved in the fight and the knife
went into his neck and severed his
spinal cord and so he can talk and he
could move his head but he cannot move
his body at all and what I’m going to
tell you about is the project which we
call brain gate but it’s a kind of brain
computer interface our attempt to take
signals from the motor cortex take them
outside the body and allow people to run
machines and control devices to free
them up to give them independence and
control again and what we do is we’ve
created this electrode array that is
implanted in the armor of your motor
cortex now the electrode array is a tiny
baby aspirin sized implant and it has a
lot of these little prongs sticking out
these are electrodes that are actually
inserted into the cortex to get up close
to these neurons that you just saw and
the reason we have to put this into the
brain is the action potentials the
spikes the electrical impulses that come
out of individual neurons only go a very
short distance so in order for us to
listen in to those impulses we have to
put electrodes up very close but those
impulses are the message of movement so
what I’m going to do is let you listen
in to a recording in which a technician
is telling in this case it’s Kathy he’s
telling her to imagine opening and
closing your hand and you’ll hear the
spikes
changed their firing rate so it’ll get
higher and lower and you could hear that
there’s in fact a code they’re high
means that there’s the hand is open and
low means the hand is closed so just
listen in for a second all right
opening your hand
relax close your on see it shuts off
relax open hand
so this is the basis of the device that
we’ve created not only recording from
one cell but taking the pattern of many
many neurons and trying to relate what
the person is thinking about to what’s
something in the real world will do and
this is the setup that we have the
person has this electrode array
implanted in their arm area motor cortex
we have now in this rather crude
primitive version because it’s just an
early stage version they have a plug in
their head the electronics are connected
by a cable that amplifies those little
tiny signals takes them through a
computer and the computer basically
counts up and measures those spikes and
tries to figure out well that means up
or that means open or that means close
and what I’m going to do is show you
some videos that that show what the
patients have been able to do of course
we were very excited and we asked Matt
you know to do a whole bunch of things
here he’s going to draw a circle and
then he’s going to tell us what it’s
like to be able to control something so
he’s controlling that cursor with his
thoughts and this is actually the
world’s first art I think were neroli
drawn circle oh oh man I can’t put it
into words it’s just I used my brain I
just thought it I said Cursi go up to
top right it said and now I could
control him it all over the screen it’s
wild actually this is you know he was
using his consciousness to manipulate
his neurons but he actually didn’t
really understand what was going on
there something happens when you think
and it’s manifest as those spike changes
but what’s really going on is the
mystery so he hadn’t moved anything at a
long time so we were able to get this
prosthetic hand and it doesn’t really do
anything it’s just a motorized hand that
can open and close so we ran a brain
command into it and told him tell us
what you’re doing and imagine opening
and closing that hand and you’re going
to hear his reaction to the first time
he’s moved something in a couple of
years because remember he’s completely
paralyzed and you’ll listen to his a
strong reaction
so just if you missed that he really
became a star by doing these things now
of course those aren’t very practical
actions and what we really want to do is
to enable people to do things that are
meaningful and for people like Kathy who
can’t speak communication is extremely
important so my colleague Leigh Hochberg
and others in our group have created you
know if you can move a cursor you can
choose words on a screen instead of
using a keyboard which you have to move
a cursor all over the screen we made a
radial keyboard with word prediction and
this is actually Kathy spelling out a
sentence so just to show that she could
use the spelling interface to convey
messages but we’d really like to see
something even more sophisticated to do
things that you can’t she can’t do she
can’t do things with her arms so here
Kathy is controlling a robot arm and
we’re doing something simple we just
elevated these little foam balls and
told her to reach out and grab them and
because of our ability to make some
sense of the way the arm is coded in
reaching space she was able to do that
so what we did is we said let’s do
something practical and meaningful for
you and so we gave her her morning
coffee and we said okay Kathy for the
first time in 15 years you’re going to
feed yourself your morning coffee and
not have to rely on another person to
come in to do that so here she is with
the control of the robotic arm on her
own taking her first drink of coffee we
found out in the afternoon she actually
sometimes had Kahlua in the coffee as
well of course they only use it in a
research setting so far what we want to
do is make it available all the time and
in fact what we really want to do and
really strive to do over the coming
decades is to be able to take a person
who can’t move and reanimate their own
muscles to really create a physical
nervous system where their biological
one is irreparable so here’s an example
of what we’re aiming to do
the idea here is that there’s an
implanted array it generates signals it
comes down to something like a smart
pack on your on your belt oh s— like a
cell phone that then communicates to an
electric nervous system and it activates
a stimulator which then stimulates the
nerves and causes the muscles to
activate so it’s what your nervous
system normally does but it’s all done
with physical components and the next
one of the next important steps is to
create something that is a basically a
smartphone inside the head and my
colleague Arturo Rico has created this
device which is something that will
allow us to wirelessly transmit all of
those complex brain signals outside and
here in now nice bloodless surgery done
in a kitchen no less the there’s the
implant the the transmitter sits
underneath the skin and it transmits all
that information out and this is not in
humans yet but it will be in the next
coming years but has been tested in
animals and this is feasible now it has
more sophistication than what you have
in your cell phone to be able to
communicate be able to tell us what’s
going on and to get that information to
the outside so this is coming the
ability to rewire the nervous system and
I asked Kathy to send me a note about
what does it mean what would she like to
do again and so she sent me this note
she typed it out I would love to garden
again I really miss gardening canning
and cooking I also wanted to be able to
hold a book with both hands or even a
robot arm
I really hope someday I’ll be able to
use my voice I can handle paralysis but
lack of communication is torture thank
you so I would say thanks thanks to them
these brief patients and thank you I
think I’ll conclude with that
you
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