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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days starting January 16, 2008.

I'm Steve Merski.

Last week, the mind of a monkey in North Carolina controlled a walking robot in Japan.

The mind that created interfaces between intelligent beings and robotic limbs belongs to Miguel

Nickelaylis.

Scientific American editor Christine Suarez recently sat down for a conversation with Nicolales

in his office at Duke University, where he's the co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering.

They talked about the organic robotic neuro-interface research and its implications for prosthetics,

as well as some exciting plans for a grand

sociological experiment in Brazil, the creation of an entire science city.

In 2004, you gave a really impressive demonstration of how your work could lead to prosthetics

controlled by the brain.

Your star monkey, Aurora, learned to play a simple video game with a joystick, but you were also essentially downloading the neural signals from her brain to control a robot arm.

Yeah. In essence, what we were doing was to record the brain activity that Aurora was producing to generate arm movements.

And after a little bit of training, both Aurora and I, we were able to basically get these signals to be decoded in real time

and translated into digital commands that could be used by a robotic arm to generate movements that Aurora was imagining.

...