Have you ever seen a brain without a body, or a body without a brain? I didn’t think so. Brain and body are inseparable, a unity. But sometimes we might want to enhance the brain’s functioning so that the body is better able to “help” a person’s nervous system accomplish things the want and need to do.
It would be nice, for example, to have a brain device that lets you have a pro golf swing. That’s probably pretty far off. But now the people who need this kind of help are the severely disabled - those with compromised mobility or some other crucial bodily function. If you can’t move, you can’t act on your own behalf.
Fortunately, promising research science efforts are making progress in helping the severely disabled with something called neuroprosthetics or neural prosthetics. That is, they are developing technology that can augment the nervous system’s ability to control movement.
The worst cases are those who have become “locked in” - conscious but unable to move any part of themselves. A common cause is a stroke centered in the brain stem. You’ve probably seen representations of this condition on medical television dramas, stuff like “blink once for yes, twice for no.” Even worse, hard to even imagine, are partially or fully conscious “locked ins” who have been misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state. (The depressing movie Johnny Got His Gun comes to mind.)
Technology can augment the brain even in severe cases, thanks to the brain’s plasticity or ability to adapt to learning. Researchers have shown that neural activity thatt corresponds to one body part can adapt and learn to move another body part. The part of the brain controlling blinking, for example, might be adapted to control vocal cords.
According to Leigh Hochberg, a neuroscientist with the Department of Veterans Affairs:
“If we can take those natural signals and send them to a functional electrical stimulation system placed in and around the muscles and nerves of an arm or a leg, someone might be able to control their own limb again using neural technology rather than injured biology.”
These are promising technologies, to say the least. Hopefully, progress from research to market will be rapid. For more on developments in neuroprosthetics, see the excellent The Rise of the Cyborgs on the Discover magazine site.