Computers obey brain waves of paralyzed

By Malcolm Ritter

updated 2:10 p.m. ET April 6, 2005

ALBANY, N.Y. - To somebody peeking into this little room, I’m just a middle-aged guy wearing a polka-dotted blue shower cap with a bundle of wires sticking out the top, relaxing in a recliner while staring at a computer screen.

But in my mind’s eye, I’m a teenager sitting bolt upright on the black piano bench of my boyhood home, expertly pounding out the stirring opening chords of Chopin’s Military Polonaise.

Not that I’ve ever actually played that well. But there’s a little red box motoring across that computer screen, and I’m hoping my fantasy will change my brain waves just enough to make it rise and hit a target.

Some people have learned to hit such targets better than 90 percent of the time. During this, my first of 12 training sessions, I succeed 58 percent of the time.

But my targets are so big that I could have reached 50 percent by random chance alone.

Bottom line: Over the past half-hour, I’ve displayed just a bit more mental prowess than you’d expect from a bowl of Froot Loops.

Take a look at what other people have accomplished lately with signals from their brains:

• A quadriplegic man in Massachusetts has shown he can change TV channels, turn room lights on and off, open and close a robotic hand and sort through messages in a mock e-mail program.
• Seven paralyzed patients near Stuttgart, Germany, have been surfing the Internet and writing letters to friends from their homes.
• At a lab in Switzerland, two healthy volunteers learned to steer a 2-inch, two-wheeled robot — sort of like a tiny wheelchair — through a dollhouse-sized floor plan.
• And at labs in several universities, monkeys operate mechanical arms with just their brains. At the University of Pittsburgh, a monkey can feed itself chunks of zucchini and orange slices this way.

Research pushing field forward
There’s nothing supernatural here. These are early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environment literally without moving a muscle.

Most dramatically, that could help “locked-in” patients — those who’ve lost all muscle movement because of conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease or brainstem strokes.

Research into harnessing brain signals goes back some 20 years. But lately it seems the research pot is starting to come to a boil, as advances in brain science, electronics and computer software have combined to push the field forward.

In fact, far more than half the scientific reports ever published in this area have appeared in the last three years alone, says researcher Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw. And while only about a half-dozen labs seriously worked in the field as late as the mid-1990s, now about 60 labs have gotten into it, he said.

“The field, in the last four or five years, has kind of exploded,” he said.

To see firsthand what all the excitement is about, I signed on as an able-bodied research subject at Wolpaw’s Brain-Computer Interface lab, part of the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health.

That blue shower cap is actually stretchable nylon mesh, polka-dotted with 64 round white electrodes that eavesdrop on the electrical activity near the surface of my brain. They pass their measurements to a computer, which calculates the strength of one particular rhythm, called the “beta” rhythm. And the computer tells that little red box to either rise or fall, depending on how strong my beta rhythm is from moment to moment.

My job, then, is to learn to control the strength of my beta rhythm — a body activity I didn’t even know I had until a few weeks before walking into Wolpaw’s lab.

INTERACTIVE The brain An interactive road map to the mind

I do know the beta rhythm is an “idling” rhythm, sort of like engine noise, with no particular function in normal life. It’s coming from the portion of my brain that tells limbs to move and receives information related to movement. And it should get weaker when I imagine moving.

So on the first day Bill Sarnacki, the senior research technician who will guide me through the training, suggests that when the computer tells me to aim at the lower target I should let my mind go blank to make the little red box fall. When I’m supposed to aim at the upper target, I should imagine moving my hands to make the box rise.

Which is why my personal foray into neuroscience begins to the music of Chopin.

Before long I seek some advice from Scott Hamel, 44, of Averill Park, N.Y., who long ago mastered this task and moved on to tougher ones.

I’d watched him move that box vertically, horizontally and diagonally, by controlling two of his brain rhythms. He doesn’t bother summoning up images any more, he said; “I just know how to make myself feel to make things happen.”

On a good day, he said, “I can manipulate that thing around the screen almost like pushing something around a desk.”

As for me, he suggests relaxing. “The harder I try, the worse I do,” he said.

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