BCI - Wessberg's monkeys

Ever fancied your monkey might be able able to move a robot arm which is hundreds of miles away from its cage only by thought, using a broadband internet connection? Well, the monkey did not switch on the computer itself, but the rest is true, according to work published by the American neurobiologist Johan Wessberg in North Carolina, US.
He took two owl monkeys and implanted 96 and 32 microelectrodes (more) respectively in five regions of the brain, all of which were thought to have a say in motor activity. Then came the training, which took about a year or so and which was necessary to find a suitable algorithm for the prediction of the monkey’s arm movements in real time (more). This, in turn, was used to drive a robot arm both in the own laboratory and even two of them simultaneously in some other labs via an internet connection (more). Feedback was missing, though (more).

Wessberg’s experiment is a so called “open loop” experiments. The monkeys act locally – they play around with their training equipment – while the electrical activity produced by their brain is used to drive a prosthesis/robot arm without the monkey actually knowing about it.

This obviously limits the practical value. For a prosthesis, you will need feedback (or a “closed loop”), as has indeed been tried (see the chapter "Taylor") recently.

In a closed loop system, the monkey would see what the robot arm does, and thus can “adapt his thoughts” according to the movement of the prosthesis. Here lies a training possibility without the necessity of motor action,, at least when the prosthesis is a screen.

What kind of training and why?

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