A young adult man with closely cropped dark brown hair sits in a wheelchair in a dimly lit room, facing a computer screen on which a simple phrase is typed out: \u201cHow are you today?\u201d Underneath the question on the screen, three dots appear\u2014similar to the ones messaging apps use to signal that your conversation partner is composing a response\u2014and flash with anticipation. One by one, new words materialize: \u201cI am very good.\u201d<\/p>\n
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At first glance, this brief conversation doesn\u2019t seem particularly special, but the man\u2019s situation is anything but ordinary. On top of his head is a small box, about one inch square in size, connected to a circular portal in his skull about the size of a nickel. Protruding from the box is a thin black cable. The man, who goes by the nickname Pancho, is paralyzed and unable to speak, but a BCI records brain waves from the part of his cortex that is responsible for generating speech, the vocal motor cortex, and translates them into words on the computer screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A young adult man with closely cropped dark brown hair sits in a wheelchair in a dimly lit room, facing a computer screen on which a simple phrase is typed out: \u201cHow are you today?\u201d Underneath the question on the screen, three dots appear\u2014similar to the ones messaging apps use to signal that your conversation [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246744","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}