Brain implants let paralyzed man make music with his thoughts
Key summary
Galen Buckwalter, 69, is a participant in a Caltech brain-computer interface study and is paralyzed from the chest down after a diving accident at 16.
He has six Blackrock Neurotech chips implanted in his motor cortex via craniotomy; each chip has 64 channels, totaling 384 neural data streams.
Neural signals are decoded to infer movement intent and are used to control a cursor and operate a custom audio interface.
The system maps individual neurons' firing rates to pitch; imagined movement-related activity alters pitch and turns neural activity into real-time musical tones.
The implants restored touch sensation in fingers that had been numb for decades, and Caltech grad student Sean Darcy developed software in his spare time to turn thought into tones; the musical system grew from asking what a brain sounds like and was inspired by biosonified mushrooms.
