You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quang here with NPR Brain Correspondent John Hamilton.

John, what do you got for us today?

I want to talk about a big change that's happening in the field of artificial limbs.

So this includes prosthetic arms and legs, you know, those are for people who've lost

a limb.

It also includes robotic arms and legs.

Degrees are what a person who is paralyzed can use in place of a limb that they no longer

can control.

For the past decade or so, I've been doing stories about systems that allow a person

to control these devices just by using their thoughts.

Yeah, I've heard about this.

That's pretty amazing technology.

It is.

And obviously to make it work, you have to decode information that's coming from a person's

brain and send it out to some mechanical device.

But what's new, what's happening now, is that scientists are turning this around.

They are finding ways to have mechanical arms and legs send information back to the user's

brain.

Okay, sending it in the other direction.

And what sort of information are we talking about?

What's getting the most attention is touch or in scientific terms, tactile feedback.

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