Seven years controlling everything with just his brain

Technology is there to make our lives easier. And this should be the only valid approach to this field of science. Fortunately, many times we see how the scientific effort goes in that direction.

Many times we have talked about Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that inserts microchips into the brain to be able to control certain things with the mind. The ultimate goal is that we can become superhumans, but there are still many steps ahead.

And despite the fact that only this company is talked about, there are dozens of attempts by the community that go in that direction: insert chips in our brain to control elements that surround us… like a computer. This, for quadriplegic people, is a whole world of possibilities.

As told in Wired, Nathan Copeland considers himself a cyborg. This 36-year-old man has lived with a brain-computer interface for more than seven years and three months. Today is the longest time anyone has had an implant of this type.

A set of electrodes about the size of a pencil eraser, surgically installed in his motor cortex, translates its neural impulses into commands that allow him to control external devices: a computer, video games and a robotic arm that moves with his thoughts.

A car accident in 2004 left Copeland paralyzed from the chest down, unable to move or feel his limbs. In 2014, he joined a University of Pittsburgh study for people with major spinal cord injuries to see if a brain-computer interfaceor BCI, could give you back some of the functionality you had lost.

He didn’t hesitate to sign up, even though it would require brain surgery and no one knew how long the device would continue to work. “When I started, they told me it would probably last five years. And those five years were based on the monkey data, because no human had ever done it before.“, He says.

The fact that Copeland’s implant still works -and has not caused any major side effects or complications- is promising for this field. It’s a sign that these devices, which have been in development since the 1960s, are moving closer to commercial reality.

But questions remain about the long-term durability of implanted matricesthat is, how much their performance will deteriorate over time, and whether they could be improved.

Copeland received his first array in 2015 and later got three more as part of the study., giving you a total of four active implants. Utah arrays are made of hard silicone and look a bit like the bristly part of a hairbrush.

A standard matrix is ​​a square grid with 100 tiny pinseach of them one millimeter long and covered with conductive metal.

Elon Musk hopes to implant his Neuralink brain chips in humans next year

Since neurons produce electrical fields when they communicate with each other, scientists can use these arrays to capture and record the activity of hundreds of nearby neurons.

To build a brain-computer interface, researchers have to translate those neural signals into digital commands that allow the user to operate a prosthesis or a computer.

The system Copeland uses, called BrainGateincludes an implanted matrix, a cable that runs from a pedestal on his head to an external device that amplifies his neural signals, and a computer that runs software to decode those signals.