How AI and neuroscience drive each other forwards

Chethan Pandarinath wants to enable people with paralysed limbs to reach out and grasp with a robotic arm as naturally as they would their own. To help him meet this goal, he has collected recordings of brain activity in people with paralysis. His hope, which is shared by many other researchers, is that he will be able to identify the patterns of electrical activity in neurons that correspond to a person's attempts to move their arm in a particular way, so that the instruction can then be fed to a prosthesis. Essentially, he wants to read their minds. "It turns out, that's a really challenging problem," says Pandarinath, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "These signals from the brain -- they're really complicated."