Kennedy was himself once a famous neurologist. In the late 1990s he made global headlines for implanting several wire electrodes in the brain of a paralyzed man and then teaching the locked-in patient to control a computer cursor with his mind. Kennedy called his patient the world's "first cyborg," and the press hailed his feat as the first time a person had ever communicated through a brain-computer interface. From then on, Kennedy dedicated his life to the dream of building more and better cyborgs and developing a way to fully digitize a person's thoughts.
Now it was the summer of 2014, and Kennedy had decided that the only way to advance his project was to make it personal. For his next breakthrough, he would tap into a healthy human brain. His own.
The saga of neurologists trying to create brain-computer interfaces.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gnuman on Saturday February 06 2016, @03:23AM
Long article. What is most interesting is how this can help locked in patients communicate with the outside world. But we are still a long way from the Borg. Maybe that's what Kennedy learned - scientific progress is generally not made by cowboy scientists.
I'm actually not too surprised by these results. Neurons are grown and experimented with by many labs, including with full brains like mice. But brain downloads or cyborgs are not going to be invented by one person with a dream. It will take more resources than that. If we can't get mice-brain-computer-interface perfected, then human-computer-interface will also be elusive. After all, mice brain is much more similar to human than to some computer and any interface issues should be similar.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 07 2016, @12:04AM
>scientific progress is generally not made by cowboy scientists.
I wouldn't say that. Rather, "most cowboy scientists don't make scientific progress". The converse is not the same thing.
To enhance the perspective, the percentage of lotteries that are won by people is not the same as the percentage of lotteries that you will win.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by goodie on Saturday February 06 2016, @03:38AM
I remember this story had left me wondering about how far scientists are willing to go to test their hypotheses... Anyway we've already covered this earlier: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/11/09/1329211 [soylentnews.org] albeit from another source.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Saturday February 06 2016, @04:42AM
He's not really testing a hypothesis without an effective control group. At this point it's more like an engineering proof of concept using well established theories.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday February 06 2016, @10:51AM
Kennedy was himself once a famous neurologist
Kennedy who?
If a summary is going to be two paragraphs copied from the middle of the article, can they at least be edited a little so they are coherent and self-contained?
Phil Kennedy was once a famous neurologist.
Simples.
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