The Neuroscience of Bobi Ray's Death

A year after Bobi's death researchers at Emory University implanted a brain computer interface into another locked in patient named Johnny Ray. His motor cortex was unable to get the signals through the damaged spinal cord but this implant could listen to the signals and then pass along that message to the computer. In 2006, a paralyzed former football player named Matt Nagel was able to control lights and open an email and play the video game Pong and draw a circle on the screen. The technology used with Johnny and Matt, it was makeshift and unpolished but it proved the possibility. And by 2011, my neuroscience colleague Andrew Schwartz and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh built a prosthetic arm almost as