The Rise of the Cyborgs | Machine-Brain Connections | DISCOVER Magazine

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“First we build the tools, then they build us.” —Marshal McLuhan

It is a stiflingly hot summer day in Atlanta. Scientist and physician Philip Kennedy has a packed schedule, so he suggests that I interview him while he drives to the tiny town of Bowdon, Georgia, just east of the Alabama line. It’s a journey he takes every Memorial Day to a small cemetery.

We park behind the redbrick Sandy Flat Baptist Church. The sun is blazing overhead, the glare from the white gravel parking lot almost blinding. But Kennedy knows exactly where he’s going. He quickly walks through the simple graves carpeted by carefully tended grass, then stops and bends down. Visibly moved by private thoughts, the scientist touches a simple headstone and leaves beside it a tribute he wrote for the man buried here, a man he calls a hero.

Johnny Ray, who died on this date six years ago, was Kennedy’s patient, his research subject, and the world’s first human cyborg , fitted with brain implants that allowed him to communicate directly with a computer.

Kennedy is the chief scientist of Neural Signals, a company he founded in 1987 to develop a brain-computer interface, or BCI, though he prefers the term “neural prosthetics.”

By any name, the devices created by Kennedy and a handful of others can decode the conscious intentions conveyed by neural signals. For those who are missing a leg or who have a broken spine, the signals can control computers, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs. For those suffering from “locked-in syndrome,” their bodies so immobilized by catastrophic disorders like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or brain stem stroke that they are unable to speak or communicate their needs, the devices can translate neural signals to spell out words on a computer screen. Spoken language through ...

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http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/26-rise-of-the-cyborgs

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/26-rise-of-the-cyborgs