Epidural electrocorticography may finally allow enduring control of a prosthetic or paralyzed arm by thought alone

Daniel Moran, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurobiology in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, is developing brain-computer interfaces based on grids of electrodes that lie beneath the skull but outside the dura mater, the protective membrane that covers the brain. His next project is to slip a thin 32-electrode grid he designed with a colleague under a macaque’s skill and to train the monkey to control — strictly by thinking about it — a computational model of a macaque arm.