Miguel Nicolelis is an ambitious man. For years he’s been decoding brain signals and trying to use them as electrical commands for robots — and now he’s at a stage where he can get a monkey to mentally control a robot which is 7,000 miles away. This is how he does it.
Amazingly, as he points out in this TED-MED lecture, he can extract a monkey’s brain signals, decode them, and send them half way around the world 20 milliseconds faster than the signal can reach the monkey’s own muscles. The long term plan is to create mind-controlled prosthetic exoskeletons for people suffering from paralysis — but here and now, the technology is just mindbogglingly amazing. [TED]