There was a video(forgot the source) where scientists use a device to detect brain signals and use those signals to manipulate mechanical hands in a paralyzed patient.
I know there are devices that can detect brain signals, but how scientists can tell if those signals are responsible for like moving fingers or moving wrist?
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You have it a bit backwards – the engineers/scientists aren’t looking for neurons in the brain that control hands/wrists/fingers specifically and trying to pair their receivers to those neurons. Instead, they’re retraining the brain to use whatever neurons are picked up by the receivers to use them to manipulate the hands. The brain is incredibly adaptable and is good at repurposing neurons (and entire regions) for new tasks, and the engineers/scientists take advantage of that plasticity. As infants, we all do this naturally which is why we go from simple flailing of our arms as newborns to having fine motor control of our limbs and digits within year or two. Over that time, the brain is literally learning how to better and better and better control the body. While we generally all use similar areas of the brain to do similar tasks, there is some natural variety in healthy and normal people, and there can be significant differences in which areas of the brain control or process this or that in people with brain injuries or abnormalities. This demonstrates that the ability to retrain parts of the brain to learn new roles is robust in all of us, we just seldom have to do it.
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