Monkey Sees, Makes Other Monkey Do

A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that avatars may be the key to aiding paralysis victims without surgery. Researchers at Harvard Medical School implanted a brain chip into a monkey, then hooked it up to a sedated avatar monkey so that the brain scan in the master controlled the real-time movement of the avatar. Ninety-eight percent of the time, a master monkey could control the physical movement of a sedated avatar. "The goal is to take people with brain-stem or spinal-cord paralysis and bypass the injury,” said one of the researchers, Dr. Ziv William. “The hope is ultimately to get completely natural movement.”