Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Monkey mind control

monkey experiment

A line drawing of a monkey performing the center-out task in virtual reality. (Drawing by Dawn Taylor.)

New US research has shown that monkeys can learn to move things using their mind alone - although an Australian expert in the area is not overly impressed.

Dawn M. Taylor from the Arizona State University and colleagues report their findings in this week's issue of Science.

The researchers placed rhesus monkeys in a 3-D virtual environment where they could make a cursor travel around a screen by appropriate movements of their hands.

Then they restricted the monkeys' arms and got them to try and move the cursor again.

They found that during the first several days of the experiment, the monkeys pushed methodically against the arm restraints in the direction they needed the cursor to move.

However this behaviour quickly subsided as the monkeys learned to move the cursor using their brain alone.

The mind training involved connecting electrodes to individual neurons in a region of the monkeys' brain called the motor cortex which normally controls the movement of limbs.

Brain activity was picked up by the electrodes and processed by a computer, which then passed the signals on to the virtual reality system.

"This indicates that it is possible to develop effective brain-control modulation patterns in the absence of physical limb movements or normal muscle activation patterns," the researchers write.

They suggest the findings could eventually help people who have been paralysed for many years.

Animal research may not be essential

An Australian expert in the area of neural control described the research as "interesting but very experimental".

"It's useful in a small way," said Professor Ashley Craig of the University of Technology, Sydney. "But we already knew that humans have this capacity," he said.

Professor Craig developed the world-first Mind Switch, which enables a person to flick a switch by remote control, just by closing their eyes and increasing the intensity of their brain waves.

His research was carried out entirely on humans using electrodes attached to the scalp. While implanting electrodes in the brain of an animal is permitted it is not considered ethical to do so in humans.

Professor Craig said that implanting electrodes in the brain was often preferred because electrodes on the scalp gave a "noisy" signal because of interfering factors such as muscle activity. However, his team spent a lot of time separating the background noise from the brain signal.

"Half of our science was involved in controlling for noise," he said.

Professor Craig said the Mind Switch was currently being trialed in paraplegic people.

Electrodes are planted in the legs of patients to stimulate the muscles needed for standing. The Mind Switch is used to turn on the electrical stimulation as required.