TechConfidential has a great article on emerging technologies that focus on BANG - bits, atoms, neurons and genes.

One of the most interesting of these is BrainGate by Cyberkinetics. According to their website, BrainGate provides “a means for people with severe motor impairment a new method to communicate with a computer directly with their thoughts.”

Last year, Matthew Nagle, who had been paralyzed from the neck down due to a knife attack, participated in the study.

Nagle spent a year connected to the BrainGate system, with a chip the size of a lentil resting on a part of his brain that controls motor functions. The chip, 16 millimeters square with 100 gold spikes on it, was sensitive enough to pick up Matt’s brain activity when he thought about movement.

The chip was connected to a cable that emerged from the top of Matt’s skull and into a contraption that resembled devices from “The Matrix” movies. In those films, Keanu Reeves is hooked up to a computer from a box in the back of his neck, which downloads intelligence into him. (”Whoa,” he says upon waking. “I know kung fu.”) Nagle’s connection went the other way; the implant uploaded brain signals into a software program that, with some tweaking, learned to interpret what they meant.

Here’s how it works: When the patient’s neurons fire, electrodes pick up the electrical activity; when the neurons are firing well, they generate electrical “spikes.” The software reads these spikes as “movement intention.”

According to the article, the Air Force is interested in such brain-computer technology to allow pilots to fly planes hands free.