
Neuroscience News
“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” - Michio Kaku
Our brain controls everything that makes us us. It makes our hearts beat, enables movement, and makes up our consciousness. For something so important, we know surprisingly very little about its inner workings. Neuroscience (the study of the nervous system and the brain) is relatively new, only emerging as a specialized area of biology in the 20th century. Since then, it has evolved rapidly and has recently been incorporated into technology and artificial intelligence. It’s striving to answer questions that impact us all, such as, what happens when we sleep and why is it essential? What is consciousness? Where do our memories go when we store them? Apart from this, it’s also being used in more niche situations that are just as important.
The newest advancement falls in the latter category. Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the company NeuroRestore in Switzerland developed the Brain-spine interface (BSI) which restores severed connections between the brain and the spinal cord. It managed to help the 40-year-old Gert-Jan Oskam go from being almost entirely paralyzed from the waist down to being able to walk in uneven terrain. "When we met him, he was completely paralyzed, unable to take a step by himself without assistance," said Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist who worked on the project. In less than a year, he could stand up and even walk for a few hundred meters. "Last week, something needed to be painted and there was nobody to help me so I took the walker and the paint and I did it myself while I was standing," said Oskam. The technology has given him freedom and movement he had not had since the motorbike incident that left him paralyzed in 2011.

How does it work?
To understand the technology, one needs to know the complex process that is walking. For us to move our legs, an electrical signal is sent from the brain down into the lumbar region of our spine. “Nerve cells take the signals and translate them into specific instructions for the leg muscles, coordinating them in a way that facilitates motion” (Floersh). All of this happens in mere milliseconds. To imitate this, one needs to design a machine that replicates the processes that only arose naturally after billions of years of evolution. It is no mean feat, but the BSI is getting close.
Technology before this breakthrough relied on the patient triggering a button that then shocked the muscles, moving them. The BSI cuts off the need for this button and can sense when the subject thinks about walking. “The stimulation before was controlling me, and now I’m controlling the stimulation,” Oskam said.

Nature Journal
When he thinks about moving his legs, a chip implanted in his brain sends signals to an external computer that Oskam wears as a backpack. Then, the computer processes the inputs and relays the information to a pacemaker set in his abdomen that sends electrical pulses to an implant in his spinal cord. This makes his legs move on command. Additionally, he has a helmet with an antenna to stay connected to the computer.
Looking towards the future
While Oskam has regained much more mobility, there is still a lot of room for refinement. The first factor that will inevitably improve the outcomes is that technology will continue to advance. There have already been studies that successfully implemented artificial intelligence into similar machines. For example, the Dutch company Onward managed to use AI to stimulate a man’s previously paralyzed hand, “It read his thoughts, his intentions to move” (Watt).
It is clear that AI technology is just in its infancy and that the exponential growth it has seen these last few years will continue for some time. As Stephen Hawking said, AI will eventually reach a level where it will essentially be a "new form of life that will outperform humans". While this has the potential to be catastrophic, in the short term it will bring a myriad of technological benefits. So far, this technology has only been used on people who are partially paralyzed, but in the not-so-distant future, this limitation might become obsolete.
Another interesting thing the researchers recorded was that the more Oskam used the BSI the stronger his previously destroyed nerve connections became. It reached the point where he could take a few steps with crutches without the machine's help. “What happens, we believe, is that by reactivating these pathways, they strengthen them.” (Capogrosso). One year before the study was published, Capogrosso tested electrical nerve stimulation on monkeys and it showed it could help people regain unassisted movement in paralyzed body parts. This revealed that the BSI could not only artificially create movement, but it could also help the patient heal.
Currently, it is estimated by Onward that this technology will become commercially available in four to seven years. However, it will have to be approved by the FDA.
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