 Six years ago, Ian Burkhart broke his spine in a diving accident while vacationing with friends. That accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. But thanks to a neural implant, he's been able to bypass his spinal cord injury and send signals from his brain down to his right arm. That technology means that Ian can now grasp objects and even move his fingers independently from each other, which is a definite scientific first. In general, when a person wants to move their finger, their brain sends a signal through their spine to their hand, but in Ian's case, that signal gets blocked. To bypass that problem, the neural implant detects the signal that Ian's brain wants to send to the finger and relays them to a sleeve on his arm. From there, the sleeve will send the right electrical impulses through the muscles in his arm so he can complete the movement. This happens in real time, which means that all Ian has to do is think of a movement to actually make it happen. And one really good example of that is Ian's ability to play video games like Guitar Hero. The system took months to perfect, but Ian can now swipe a credit card and play video games that demand a lot of dexterity. With more practice, he can increase his range of movement even further. But there's only so much he can do with the current implant. Right now, the size of the system fits on a tabletop, which makes it impossible for him to use it outside the lab. And then there's the problem of the implant's precision. It currently uses 96 electrodes to capture signals from Ian's brain. That's not enough to translate precise movements like those that let us spread fingers on a keyboard, for instance. So the researchers plan to increase the number of electrodes to a couple thousand. They'd also like to compress the computer so that it fits entirely inside the implant. If they can do that, then people might actually be able to use it on the go. But that's still a long way off. The researchers wouldn't tell me exactly how much the whole system costs, but it's clear that even making small changes is going to be expensive. And then there's the fact that the technology isn't quite there yet. That doesn't mean that Ian is going to be the first and last person to use the implant, though. The researchers have gotten approval to use it on four other people, which means that we might hear some really great news about other cases like Ian's very soon. I'm probably going to ad-lib the explanation. Um, where I'm going to fuck up is forgetting to talk about, like, this happens in real time. I'm telling you because I'm hoping that my brain will remember that that's where I fuck up. I'm just going to try it and we'll see what happens.