I'm not a medical person, can anyone who knows more than me explain exactly how cool this is? Fixing spinal cords, or just repairing simple nerve severance?
... or just make it a plane's control surface.
I don't see why it's fundamentally impossible?
Unless you had a tinfoil hat (well, suit).
> To establish this digital bridge, we integrated two fully implanted systems that enable recording of cortical activity and stimulation of the lumbosacral spinal cord wirelessly and in real time (Fig. 1a).
In fact, the conductor was half-joking. I'd probably go for fiber, even if it adds latency at the endpoints.
Some pretty basic encryption scheme should handle infosec angle.
This is almost probably not what you want. Your nerves respond pretty quickly already and you can do things faster than you can think about them (e.g. catching a ball) so there's more to the computation than the "CPU".
I have read that the myelin sheath on your nerves is thicker at birth then as an adult. The theory (not mine!) is that as it thins the capacitance goes down and perhaps this helps keep the transmission time more constant as yu grow, so that what you have learned about walking, catching a ball, drinking hot coffee from a cup continues to work. Imperfectly -- kids are clumsy -- but enough that you can quickly adapt and not have to keep learning all over again.
But as an adult / teen my arm is now a foot or more longer. So the signal would take x+y microseconds to get to my hand - but if the resistance of the nerves reduces it's signal is faster and back to x microseconds
That's brilliant
It was a lifetime of tiny adjustments. We'd be lost in our adult bodies if it were a sudden transition.
As a teen, I was observably clumsier than I was as a small kid.