Can't Touch This Feeling
From: Scientific American - 12/2011 - page 18
By: Sharon Begley

Primates can now move and sense the textures of objects using only their
thoughts 

When real brains operate in the real world, it’s a two-way street. Electrical
activity in the brain’s motor cortex speeds down the spinal cord to the part
of the body to be moved; tactile sensations from the skin simultaneously zip
through the spinal cord and into the brain’s somatosensory cortex. The two
actions are virtually inseparable: absent the feel of a floor under your
feet, it’s awfully difficult to walk properly, and lacking the tactile
sensation of a coffee mug, your brain cannot sense how tightly your fingers
should grasp it. Until now, attempts to help paralyzed patients move a
prosthetic have addressed only half of our interaction with the world. A new
study offers hope of expanding that capacity. 

Scientists led by Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiology at Duke
University Medical Center, have reported the first-ever demonstration in
which a primate brain not only moved a “virtual body” (an avatar hand on a
computer screen) but also received electric signals encoding the feel of
virtual objects the avatar touched—and did so clearly enough to texturally
distinguish the objects. If the technology, detailed in the journal Nature,
works in people, it would change the lives of paralyzed patients. (Scientific
American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They would not only be able to
walk and move their arms and hands, Nicolelis says, but also to feel the
texture of objects they hold or touch and to sense the terrain they tread on. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cant-touch-this-feeling

Links:
Miguel Nicolelis
http://www.neuro.duke.edu/faculty/nicolelis/

Andrew Schwartz
http://www.neurobio.pitt.edu/faculty/schwartz.htm