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posted by CoolHand on Monday November 09 2015, @11:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the self-study dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:11AM (#261157)
    If he had zero fucks he wouldn't be doing this. What this shows is he really gives the fuck about finding out more in this field than most people do.

    So much fuck that he's willing to risk fucking up his own brain and life.
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