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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Today in the podcast, an evolving technology has the potential to change the lives of people with paralysis.

You would describe it in a way that was like, well, you know, since my injury, this will be

the first time that I can figuratively rise up out of my bed and interact with the world.

The tech is called brain computer interfaces. They're devices that are implanted in the brain and record neural activity and translate those signals into commands for a computer. This allows people to type, play computer games, and talk with others, just by thinking. Today we're checking in on this technology and where it's headed with two

researchers at the front lines of this work. Dr. Matthew Wilsie is an assistant professor of

neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor, and Dr. Sergei

Stavisky is an assistant professor of neurosurgery and co-director of the neuroprosthetics lab at the University

of California, Davis. Welcome to you both to Science Friday. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Matt, I want to start with you. You work on technology that lets people control objects on a screen by

thinking. Does that sound right? Give me the 10,000 foot view of what you do. Yes, that's accurate.

So the research that I work on is aimed at people with paralysis. And so people that typically

can't move their arms or the legs, they have no way to really control these devices, you know,

with movements that you and I would use. And so what we can do

is we can actually place electrodes into people's brain with the brain surgery and then interpret

what they're trying to do and use that signal to actually control devices on the computer screen.

Tell me about this recent paper where you had a participant with

paralysis in all four limbs who was able to control what looks kind of like a drone in a video

game just by thinking. Yeah. So this is a person who had spinal cord injury. He was implanted by

Jamie Henderson at Stanford University in 2016. What we did is we used a system, an electrode

system that could be planted into the brain itself. We then recorded the signals that were coming

out of the brain and created a method where we could take the signals and interpret what he was

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