Brain-Computer Interface Trials Are Taking Off
4 Articles
4 Articles
Brain implants are at the threshold of everyday life. For 19 months, a paralyzed man was able to speak with them again – even outside the laboratory. The great success raises crucial questions.
Brain-computer interface trials are taking off
This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell—a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables him to “speak,” surf the web, and perform his job as a climate activist, largely independently. Since Harrell was implanted wi…
A patient with ALA and severe paralysis who has been living with a brain implant since 2023 shows that this system reads the neuronal activity associated with the attempt to speak and that it also does so in a stable, autonomous way and in a domestic environment, without the presence of researchers.
A brain-computer interface has, for the first time, restored fluent everyday speech to a person who had lost it — a man with ALS who had not spoken aloud in years until a small implant from the BrainGate clinical trial began translating his attempts to speak directly into computer-synthesised words, in a result researchers reported in June 2026
Casey Harrell can now talk for twelve hours at a stretch. Two years ago, he could not talk at all. The ALS he was diagnosed with several years earlier had progressively destroyed the motor neurons controlling the muscles of his face and throat, leaving him with the symptoms doctors call dysarthria and, eventually, anarthria — the inability to speak intelligibly even with substantial effort. Harrell still knew what he wanted to say. The neural co…
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