Just finished reading The Brain Electric: The dramatic high-tech race to merge minds and machines

This book traces the development of modern BMI, following the works of Eric Leuthardt (EEG, ECoG), John Donoghue et al. (Utah Array, Cyberkinetics/Braingate), Andrew Schwarz, and Miguel Nicolelis. Does a good job describing the important publications and experiments. More importantly, I find the descriptions about how DARPA funding changes affect BMI, and the politics/races between the investigators very interesting. The quotes are pretty believable, according to what I personally know about the people described.

Some interesting points:

• When DARPA decides on a project, there are “selected” organizations they prefer. Proposals that involve those organizations are favored. For example, APL and DEKA in the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

  The APL technical digest has a series of articles describing the development of the Modular Prosthetic Limb, very cool!

• Cyberkinetics really pioneered the way for BMI to be used in humans, but also demonstrated just how little the market for BMI is. Best bet is probably military applications, then trickle down to civilian uses methinks.

  The intellectual property Cyberkinetics owns is ridiculous:

  merged with Bionic Technologies, a neurotech firm cofounded by Normann, who hed the patent for the Utah array. […] added a neural decoding patent out of Brown, while also licensing an astonishingly broad patent held by Emory University’s Donald Humphrey. Granted in 2001, Humphrey’s patent laid claim to any system that uses sensors implanted in the central nervous system to record and process neural signals that are transmitted to an external device. In other words, most any BCI.

• Philsophical point, which was brought up by Nicolelis in his book Beyond Boundaries, is that consciousness and our brain even may be defined by ability to perform actions. Interesting only in the sense that some have extrapolated the experimental results to this vague point. But without “thought-provoking” points like this, the book won’t be nearly as interesting to non-scientific readers.

• Sensory perception may need to be investigated more to enable natural BMI – brain constructs models of the outside world and compares to sensory inputs.

• I may need to read more about the Mirror Neurons.

  Rizzolatti and his protege’s original research on Mirror Neurons:

  • Pelegrino et al., Understanding motor events: a neurophysiology study

  • Rizzolatti et al., Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions

  • Gallese et al., Action recognition in the premotor cortex

  • Fogassi et al., Parietal Lobe: From action organization to intention understanding - showed neurons coding a specific act showed makredly different activations when this act was part of different actions, and discharged during the observation of those acts done by others.

  These probably explain why passive observation training work in BMI.

  Marco Iacoboni’s book presents how mirror and canonical neurons may relate to the motor system’s symbolic construction of the physical realm.

  Kohler et al., Hearing sounds, understanding actions: action representation in mirror neurons

• Finally got around to read the big Schwarz papers:

  • Collinger et al., High-performance Neuroprosthetic control by an individual with tetraplegia
  • Wodlinger et al., Ten-dimensional anthropomorphic arm control in a human brain-machine interface: difficuluties, solutions, and limitations, very good read!