'BrainGate' Brain-Machine-Interface takes shape

DARPA

The Brown University group was partially funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organisation for the US Department of Defence (DoD). DARPA has been interested in Brain-Machine-Interfaces (BMI) for a number of years for military applications like wiring fighter pilots directly to their planes to allow autonomous flight from the safety of the ground. Future developments are also envisaged in which humans could 'download' memory implants for skill enhancement, allowing actions to be performed that have not been learned directly.

Surgenor discounts the near term possibility of this type of 'memory enhancement', however, saying several critical factors would have to be overcome.

"I don't know about memory but I do think that it will be possible to augment sense. Instantaneous sensation will be possible. In order to do memory we'd have to figure out how the brain actually stores that information, which is not well understood at this point.

"You can learn to interpret an electrical stimulation pattern in your ear and turn that into sound. So that's a sensation. Some companies are interested in connecting television cameras to the retina of the eye, and there's other groups - academics, not companies - that are interested in putting a connector directly to the part of the brain that processes vision. Those are the cortical applications envisaged at the moment - vision and hearing."

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