The experiment described is ultimately an attempt to

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In a major step toward helping paralytic victims walk again, Duke University researchers have announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.

The investigators implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes which gathered signals from her brain's motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells' responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya's legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted real time from their lab in Durham, to control the commands of a humanoid robot in Kyoto, Japan.

Through the electrodes in her brain, the researchers discovered that some neurons fire at different phases and frequencies, depending on their role in the process. During the experiment, the robot continued to move for several minutes after Idoya stopped strolling on her treadmill indicating something else also.

The team’s goal is to finally enable real-time direct interfaces between a brain and electronic and mechanical devices that could be used to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injury or disease. The team hopes that one day soon, they will also master sufficient syntax to talk back to the brain, which would enable them, for instance, to build a human prosthetic arm laden with sensors to send tactile feedback into the somatosensory cortex of its user.

The experiment in monkey-to-robotic motion is the latest in a long series of studying the primate brain's ability to stimulate robotic arms through neural signals. In 2000 Nicolelis and his colleagues described how they had reliably translated the raw electrical brain activity of an owl monkey named Belle into signals that successfully directed the actions of robotic arms based both at Duke and at an MIT lab 965 kilometers away in Cambridge. Belle's tiny hand moved a joystick left or right to correspond with a horizontal series of lights on a display panel in a Duke lab; both robot arms followed suit.

A few years later, the team listened in on brain signals generated by a rhesus monkey named Aurora using a joystick to play a video game and translated them into commands for a mechanical arm to duplicate the motions. Aurora was ultimately able to move a robotic arm sans the joystick, using only her thoughts, an experiment that the team believes addresses fundamental questions about how brain circuits operate.