The Brain Computer Interface Pt 2.

        A while ago I wrote about the brain-computer interface, where man meets machine.   Last year, Dr. Phil Kennedy, a sixty seven year old neurologist emulated many of the great physicians of the past in  using  himself as  a guinea pig in  the cause of advancing science and humanity.  Dr. Kennedy had electrodes implanted into his brain to establish a connection between his brain  and a computer.  At his own expense and  of course outside the U.S., he had the surgery performed at a cost of $25,000.  
        Kennedy's aim was to build a speech decoder that could translate the signals produced by the neurons by transforming imagined speech into actual words coming  out  of a speech synthesizer.   He decided to do this because he could not get adequate funding and could not find research subjects and his whole research project of many years was about to die.  He presented the studies of his own brain at  the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.  His finding were greeted with interest as well as criticism for carrying out invasive research on himself.  He developed an electrode of gold wires in a container with a blend of growth factors that induced neuron growth.  He eventually got FDA approval to implant electrodes in patients so paralysed that they could not even speak.  He oversaw implantation in at least five severely paralysed patients, who could turn a switch on  or off, or move a cursor on a screen by just thinking.  Because 'locked-in' people cannot communicate it became very difficult to provide the detailed information that the FDA demanded and they withdrew their permission despite Kennedy's publications in reputable journals.  He needed a patient with sufficient speech to be able to confirm what he was thinking when a particular batch  of neurons fired.  Kennedy decided that he needed a subject who could speak sufficiently to corroborate the similarity of the neural relationship between speaking sounds and thinking them.  He couldn't find a volunteer for the surgery, so he decided that he would have to do  it himself.  He had designed the electrodes and just had to find a neurosurgeon to implant them.  He knew that would be impossible to arrange in  the U.S. for reasons I don't have to explain.
     He arranged his surgery at a small hospital in Belize, well outside the purview of the FDA.  He had his skull opened and the electrodes implanted.  Some thought the procedure unwise, but in days of yore it was not unheard of for physicians to try new treatments out on themselves before subjecting their patients to the risk.  After returning home, Kennedy worked in  his speech lab recording his neuronal activity as he repeated certain sounds out loud and then imagining saying them.  He says he determined that different combinations of the neurons he was recording from consistently fired every time he spoke certain sounds aloud, and also fired when he imagined speaking them—a relationship that is potentially key to developing a thought decoder for speech.  Others had used only electrodes placed outside the skull which was obviously much less sensitive and we will also examine their work later .   Unfortunately, Kennedy had to cut his experiment short for medical reasons related to his skull incision.   He did, fortunately, get four weeks of good data which he is continuing to work on.    I will be reporting on the progress of this science-fiction like work by Kennedy and others.