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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . By Nathan Ahlgrim If we want to – to paraphrase the classic Six Million Dollar Man – rebuild people, rebuild them to be better, stronger, faster, we need more than fancy motors and titanium bones. Robot muscles cannot help a paralyzed person stand, and robot voices cannot restore communication to the voiceless, without some way for the person to control them. Methods of control need not be cutting-edge. The late Dr. Stephen Hawking’s instantly recognizable voice synthesizer was controlled by a single cheek movement , which seems shockingly analog in today’s world. Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are the emerging technology that promise to bypass all external input and allow robotic devices to communicate directly with the brain. Dr. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, discussed the good and bad of this technology in March’s The Future Now NEEDs seminar:  " To Be Implanted a...

By Peter Leistikow This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris in Summer 2016. Peter Leistikow is an undergraduate student at Emory University studying Neuroscience and Sociology. When he is not doing research in pharmacology, Peter works as a volunteer Advanced EMT in the student-run Emory Emergency Medical Service.  Ever since the advent of electricity, people have tried to harness this power for therapeutic purposes. Nineteenth century posters touted the benefits of “self-applicable curatives for nervous, functional, chronic, and organic diseases” in the form of electric belts and harnesses (Browne 2014). Although these items are historical curiosities today, scientists are still trying to harness the potential benefits of electricity, especially in the treatment of psychiatric and learning disorders. Transcranial direct current stimulation ( TDCS ) is a non-invasive experimental procedure that u...

The will to persevere when many of life’s challenges are thrown at us is an ability that comes more naturally for some than for others. Additionally, even the most determined among us have days and times when moving forward through a challenging task just proves too difficult. The subjective nature of this experience can make it difficult to study, but recently researchers from Stanford University published a case study where electrical brain stimulation (EBS) to the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) left two patients with the feeling that a challenge was approaching, but also that they could overcome it [1]. For the most recent journal club of the semester, Neuroscience graduate student and AJOB Neuroscience editorial intern Ryan Purcell led a discussion on the experimental procedure to stimulate what is referred to as the “the will to persevere” and the effect this technology may have if it were to become more mainstream in society. "The location of the electrodes in P1 and ...