Eventually, brain implants will become as common as heart implants. I have no doubt about that.
Miguel Nicolelis
A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.
It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.
We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.
The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.
We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.
Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.
In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.
We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.
We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.
We want kids to think that they can think about science. They don't need to just play soccer.
I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.
There are several patients - there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson's disease.
I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.
We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.
With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
