A recent story published in Science Daily told the first case of a patient’s controlling robotic arms using thoughts alone. The project was conducted as a clinical collaboration between Caltech, Keck Medicine of USC and Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. Most earlier experiments on allowing brain’s controls over prosthetic limbs were done by implanting neural prosthetic devices to the motor cortex, the brain’s movement center, which gives detailed orders to the body through spinal cord for the right movements. They often observed clumsy responses and didn’t work as smoothly as designed. Now a different approach is adopted. For the first time, two small chips were implanted to the brain’s posterior parietal cortex area (PPC), a high-level cognitive area responsible for the “intent” of the movement, an early pathway of a brain’s movement planning. By recording the signals from PPC cells and decoding them through computer analysis simultaneously, computer can in turn order the prosthetic limbs to do what the brain has intended. It created an almost out-of-world experience for the first long-term paralyzed patient when he could grab a drink or move the computer mouse easily by just using his own thought alone.

Another study by Stanford published in WIRED this week is about using neural stem cells to grow 3-D pieces of brain balls -“human cortical spheroids” (hCSs) – that can look, form connections and pass signals like living brain matters. Molecules in stem cells submerged in nutrient fluid started dividing and growing, forming the “messenger” type of new cells, astrocytes, which are critical for the formation of synapses – bridges between neurons for passing electric signals. The high excitement of this experiment comes from the possibility that with today’s technological capabilities, the organic growth patterns of those “brain matters” in the lab can be sliced and recorded in great details with time through electrophysiological recording. Therefore real models of neural network are palpable and the human brain may be truly deciphered in its entirety one day.