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Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.
Along with a small group of pioneers, Kennedy, who was born in Ireland, had in the late 1980s developed "invasive" human brain-computer interfaces—literally wires inside the brain attached to a computer, and he is widely credited as the first to allow a severely paralyzed "locked-in" patient to move a computer cursor using her brain. "The father of cyborgs," one magazine called him.
Kennedy's scientific aim has been to build a speech decoder—software that can translate the neuronal signals produced by imagined speech into words coming out of a speech synthesizer. But this work, carried out by his small Georgia company Neural Signals, had stalled, Kennedy says. He could no longer find research subjects, had little funding, and had lost the support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:58AM
The part where he can't talk after one of the surgeries is pretty scary too, even though he says he understood everything that was going on and was not the least bit worried... Pretty crazy stuff. And it's not like he had (as far as we know) cancer or something incurable illness that meant he could toy with his own body without any regrets. Guy has at least one son... Anyway this is quite a leap from the comparison with the ulcer guys (to me).