Parallel processor
Early research, Donoghue said, was "heavily involved in the fundamental properties of movement and how the brain controls movement—both to understand normal movement and to understand what happens to movement when something goes wrong with the nervous system." Medical researchers began to realize that the brain is a parallel processor. Thus, merely contacting single neurons to analyze their behavior would never unlock the secrets of brain/body control systems.

"A lot of people were working on the problem of how neurons in the brain code for movement. We needed a particular tool, called an electrode array, that could record lots of neurons," he recalled. "We worked hard over the years to develop a method to record lots of neurons and to make sense out of the language of neurons, and as we did that, it became clear to us that what we were developing was a revolutionary sensor in the brain—and that we could understand the language of neurons in the brain."

It dawned on researchers that the ability to contact the brain and decode its neural signals might lead to techniques to let people with irreparable nerve damage directly control mechanical devices in their Environment via computers. A relatively simple strategy would be to show that someone could control a cursor on a computer screen through the same cognitive mechanisms that we use to control our limbs. Once that feat had been achieved, modern wired or wireless embedded control systems could be activated to give someone with no Motor control over their body quite a bit of control over their environment.

A couple of years ago, Donoghue and his colleagues conducted a breakthrough experiment that clearly demonstrated the feat could be achieved. "We tried it with a monkey first and showed that the sensor would pick up enough information from neurons that we could make sense out of the information. The monkey could play a videogame with its hand, and then we could just switch over to the sensor-based system and use commands directly out of its brain to play the videogame," he said.