FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, OCTOBER 2015The resulting paper, published in 2008, was a watershed moment for neuroscientist Andrew Schwartz. CBS’s 60 Minutes came calling. The study landed on the front page of The New York Times and was subsequently picked up by countless other news organizations. No one had ever shown such elegant neural control of a robot arm.
Schwartz had clearly knocked it out of the park, and his University of Pittsburgh lab was inundated with interview requests. It was a gratifying moment for the researcher, but not a comfortable one for a guy who’s more interested in the science than in the demo. “I hated it. I could never express what I wanted to express. All I could say is ‘self-feeding. Yeah, they can grasp pieces of food and bring it to their mouth,’” he said. “You end up telling the same damn thing over and over.”
Still, Schwartz was undeniably proud of the work. He’d shown proof of principle: not only could a monkey gain elegant and continuous control over a robot arm, but it could also use it as a ...
