Researcher Rob Gaunt prepares Nathan Copeland for sensory testing.UPMC/PITT HEALTH SCIENCESFollowing surgery to connect his brain to an array of electrodes, Nathan Copeland, who was paralyzed from the upper chest down in a car accident in 2004, experienced a natural touch sensation in response to stimulation of his sensory cortex, according to a study published today (October 13) in Science Translational Medicine.
“For most tasks that involve manipulation of objects, you’re really relying on the sense of touch to guide movement—you’re not using vision, necessarily,” study coauthor Jennifer Collinger of the University of Pittsburgh told Scientific American. “You don’t have any visual feedback on how hard you’re squeezing it, or what you need to do to maintain stable posture. All of that comes from the sense of touch.”
The researchers implanted a microelectrode array in Copeland’s somatosensory cortex, the brain region involved in touch perception. Once implanted, the researchers delivered mild electrical currents to the electrodes, which can be hooked up to a smart prosthetic arm. Initially, Copeland felt nothing, but after about a month, the microstimulation began to produce tactile sensations, which he described as “possibly ...
