She Heard Her Brain in Action (2013)

nautil.us

43 points·dnetesn··5 comments

Does anyone know how long these sorts of electrodes are effective?

I've read that implants that help with parkinsons lose effectiveness after a couple of years due to a build up of scar tissue. Should we expect that the woman in the article has already lost the motor control the implants gave her, or are these a different sort of electrode?

I vaguely remember reading there are cases of Auditory Brain stem Implants (to restore some forms of hearing) running for decades. No idea how similar that is to this case though.

A fundamental problem a lot of this work has to confront is that interpreting motor behavior is generally the best way of interpreting brain activity.

The activity that's happening in the brain but never reaches the level of motor activity (in people that are not disabled and/or impaired in some way) is problematic to interpret as it is difficult to control and may not even be properly regarded as intentional.

There's obviously a really hard signal processing and filtering problem here but in terms of getting any inputs into a computer

Can sensitive microphones be used to non-invasively listen for firing neurons?

I would imagine the brain is a very noisy place, full of blood moving around, gently jostling as one moves their head, environmental noise coming through the skull, etc.

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