Engineering Telekinesis: Restoring Movement with Brain-Computer Interfaces

Roughly one in fifty Americans lives with some form of paralysis, most often caused by stroke or spinal cord injury. In these cases, the pathway between brain and body has been interrupted, but the neural signals that would normally drive movement are still very much alive at the source.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a way around the injury. By reading signals directly from the brain and rerouting them to a device, whether a robotic arm, a computer cursor, or the person's own paralyzed limb, this technology can restore a kind of movement that was once thought to be lost.

Join Kushaal Rao, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Brown University, as he demystifies how brain-computer interfaces actually work, where the science currently stands, and what the future might hold for people living with paralysis.

Speaker: Kushaal Rao, Brown University