{"id":23122,"date":"2016-03-04T15:17:16","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T23:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/watch-monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-with-just-their-thoughts"},"modified":"2017-06-04T10:45:31","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:45:31","slug":"watch-monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-with-just-their-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/watch-monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-with-just-their-thoughts","title":{"rendered":"Watch Monkeys Drive Wheelchairs With Just Their Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/L2O58QfObus?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>At this rate, we may see Ray Kurzweil\u2019s vision of connected humans to the cloud and full singularity before 30 years.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Duke University scientists have given a pair of monkeys the ability to drive a wheelchair with their thoughts alone. The work is described in<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/srep22170\"> a paper recently published in the journal<em> Scientific Reports<\/em><\/a> and adds to a growing body of work in brain-machine interfaces aiming to return some freedom to the severely disabled.<\/p>\n<p>Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his team first began<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2016\/03\/160303094320.htm\"> experimenting back in 2012<\/a>, when they implanted hundreds of microfibers as thin as a human hair in the brains of two rhesus macaque monkeys. The fibers recorded cortical activity associated with \u201cwhole-body movement\u201d and sent the signals to a computer.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/watch-monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-with-just-their-thoughts2.jpg\" alt=\"monkeys-wheelchairs-thought-controlled-6\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\"\/>To start, the monkeys sat in wheelchairs that were moved along various paths toward a bowl of grapes across the room. Their brain activity was read and decoded by a computer program and then associated with wheelchair commands.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2016\/03\/04\/watch-monkeys-drive-wheelchairs-with-just-their-thoughts\/\">http:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2016\/03\/04\/watch-monkeys-drive-whe...-thoughts\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At this rate, we may see Ray Kurzweil\u2019s vision of connected humans to the cloud and full singularity before 30 years. Duke University scientists have given a pair of monkeys the ability to drive a wheelchair with their thoughts alone. The work is described in a paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,47,2018,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-neuroscience","category-ray-kurzweil","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23122"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62551,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23122\/revisions\/62551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}