You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain. Watch to the end for an experiment that, as he says, will go to “the limit of your imagination.”
Miguel Nicolelis: Brain-to-brain communication has arrived. How we did it | Talk Video | TED.com.
A rhesus macaque walks with the aid of a pneumatically powered exoskeleton controlled by a computer reading signals from electrodes implanted in the monkey’s motor cortex. Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University are developing similar devices that could allow paralyzed humans to walk again.
Monkeys Steer Wheelchairs With Their Brains, Raising Hope for Paralyzed People.
Maryam Shanechi and her team at USC work on control systems, neuroscience and signal processing to develop brain machine interfaces. These interfaces are being used to help patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, aid in anesthesia administration, and contribute to the prosthetic limb development.
via Solve For X.
The researchers found that if people got the chance to physically experience their own body with different skin colors (or ages and sexes), their unconscious biases against other racial groups could be diminished.
via BBC News.
An Iron Man-like solider suit is in development in Ekso Bionic’s workshop. Forbes’s Bruce Upbin gets the first look at what Ekso is building as part of the government’s Warrior Web project and tries out the experimental wearable robot for himself.
A paraplegic man has made the first kick of the 2014 World Cup using a mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton. Juliano Pinto, a 29-year-old with complete paralysis of the lower trunk, performed the symbolic kick-off at the Corinthians Arena in Sao Paulo.
Watch video: Multimedia Gallery – US National Science Foundation (NSF).
Current rehabilitation therapies are medieval, Krakauer, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Hopkins, told the audience of science writers. “It’s time for a revolution.”
via National Geographic News: John Krakauer’s Stroke of Genius.
To create the stunning 3D visualisations in this video, Karl Deisseroth and team had to make the brain transparent. Nature Video explains how they did it and marvels at the results.
Neuroscientists use scanning techniques to tell which areas of the brain are active during different tasks. Now by looking deeper into these blobs, they can decode what a person is seeing, remembering and even dreaming.
Course description
Hollywood and Neuroscience
via TED Blog.