Flying cars, android inhabitants and brain-machine interfaces

Flying cars, android inhabitants, pregnant men, moon colonies, remote control fighter planes–and soon–eternal life. The future is here. No, seriously, I think this time we’ve really crossed the modernity threshold and entered a Jetsons-like universe. Yesterday the AP reported that European scientists had succeeded in connecting a complex human-like biomechanic hand to a man’s nervous system.

The man, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, had lost his forearm in a car accident. But thanks to advances in the implementation of BIM’s (brain-machine interfaces) he was able to move the robotic hand with his mind. The hand was also able to transmit a sense of touch. Reportedly, scientists poked the robotic hand and that actually stimulated Petruzziello’s nervous system. He felt the poke.

Unfortunately he did not get to keep the hand. One of the breakthroughs of this particular research, which according to the AP was commissioned by the European Union for $3 million and lasted 5 years, was that the hand stayed connected to the patient’s nervous system for a month. The next step, then, is to make make limbs that can remain connected to a patient’s nervous system for extended periods of time. This, I believe, will take place as a matter of course in the near future.

Paolo Maria Rossini was the neurologist in charge of the research, which took place at Campu’s Bio-Medico in Rome. Neuroscience has become one of the most exiting scientific fields of our time. The mapping and in-depth study of the brain by using neuroimaging tools such as MIR’s (magnetic resonance imaging) among many other tools have opened navigating routes to a vast yet-still-enigmatic universe.

However attractive the study of the brain can be from a research stance, it is also exiting–if not more so–witnessing normal citizens reaping neuroscience’s benefits. When teamed up with say robotics and prosthetics, neuroscience is well on its way to improving our daily lives not in a hundred years, but now. Just ask Pierpaolo Petruzziello.