Daniel 12:4 But you, Daniel, roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.”
Important Takeaways:
- A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With Brain and Spine Implants
- Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again.
- “For 12 years I’ve been trying to get back my feet,” Mr. Oskam said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural.”
- In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off.
- “We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.
- Oskam had undergone stimulation procedures in previous years, and had even regained some ability to walk, but eventually his improvement plateaued. At the press briefing, Mr. Oskam said that these stimulation technologies had left him feeling that there was something foreign about the locomotion, an alien distance between his mind and body.
- The new interface changed this, he said: “The stimulation before was controlling me, and now I’m controlling the stimulation.”
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