The Society for Neuroscience is wrapping up its annual conference. This year it was held in San Diego, and I’m currently in transit on my way back from it.

Before giving some more coherent thoughts (probably when I get back to my desk in Brooklyn), I wanted to share a small taste of the most remarkable thing I saw: the science-fiction-like progress being made in brain-machine interface. That’s using signals recorded from the brain to affect the outside world, such as creating robotic limbs for amputees or allowing the movement of a computer cursor with one’s mind.

Perhaps most astounding to me was a video along the lines of this, where a monkey feeds itself by means of a robotic arm (the monkey is not an amputee, for those concerned, its arms are just immobilized) attached to an array reading neuron firings in its motor cortex:

And this is an old video. Andrew Schwartz, of the University of Pittsburgh’s Motorlab, showed a much more impressive video in a press conference on Tuesday (not yet available for distribution), in which the monkey appeared to have much better control of the arm — including a wider range of motion and finer motor control.

Amazing things are possible with these arrays hooked directly into brains. One thing being tested in humans right now is this BrainGate device, allowing a paraplegic to move a cursor around a computer screen. This local news broadcast gives a peek (ignore the hokey “Twilight Zone” music):

Of course, there’s also a demand for less intrusive devices. To that end, Eric Sellers showed off the Wadsworth Center’s BCI Home System, which uses EEG (electroencephalography, which is non-invasive) to allow ALS patients to “type” using only their brains. It’s far from perfect, but it seems to offer an improvement over eye-tracking devices, which perform a similar function.

Another EEG application is far more commercial: video games. A company called Emotiv is shortly to release a game where players control the action with their minds. It’s pretty rudimentary stuff, but first of its kind. And there’s a video demo:

Now, EEG is far less powerful than direct implantation of arrays into the brain — obviously because it’s reading a much weaker signal. Schwartz told me EEG is just doing now what direct implantation could do 12 years ago. But it’s also the only way most people would ever be willing to experience brain-machine interface (there aren’t too many people clamoring to have things implanted in their brains … yet), so I hope some serious effort is put into that end of things.

All in all, it’s hard for someone of my generation to avoid thinking of Luke’s prosthetic hand in “Star Wars.” A “long, long time ago” might just end up being in my lifetime.