When I am not obsessing about politics, I am checking into the latest in neuroscience. My education was in philosophy and history and my focus was on the history of religion and of course the mind/body issue is kind of paramount in that field of study. I like to keep some distance between my political work and my philosophical ruminations, especially considering the fact that I don’t exactly hold a majority position when it comes to issues of spirituality. Nonetheless, I thought I’d share the following because it is quite promising from a medical point of view, and it also speaks volumes about the materialist position in the whole Cartesian debate.
A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.
The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.
“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.
In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.
Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain.
A former high school football star in Weymouth, Mass., Mr. Nagle was paralyzed below the shoulders after being stabbed in the neck during a melee at a beach in July 2001. He said he was not involved in starting the brawl and didn’t even know what sparked it. The man who stabbed him is now serving ten years in prison, he said.
There is more below the fold.
The sensor measures 4 millimeters — about one sixth of an inch — on a side and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex that is responsible for arm movement, and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.
When the device was to be used, technicians connected the pedestal to a computer with a cable. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.
Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets, as technicians calibrated the machine, a process that took about half an hour each time. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by nearby neurons as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.
Scientists said the study was important because it showed that the neurons in Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex were still active, years after they had any role to play in physically moving his arms.
Cursor control was not very smooth. In a task where the goal was to guide the cursor from the center of the screen to a target on the perimeter, Mr. Nagle hit the target about 73 to 95 percent of the time. When he did, it took an average of 2.5 seconds, though sometimes much longer. The second patient tested with the implant had worse control than Mr. Nagle, the paper said.
By contrast, healthy people moving the cursor by hand can hit the target almost every time and in only one second.
If anyone tells you that ideas lack matter, or are immaterial, you can point them to this article. As for how well you can move matter without a brain? You can’t. I’m sure James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and countless others will be gravely disappointed to hear this news. That’s too bad. We’d all like to live forever. At least we think that until we actually think about it and wonder where we would get good curry.