Last year, a paralysed man walked thanks to a cap of electrodes that read his brainwaves, and implants that stimulated his leg muscles. But directly stimulating muscles in this way can make movements jerky and uncoordinated. “Walking is a very complex behaviour: you need to coordinate the activity of hundreds of muscles and maintain balance,” says Grégoire Courtine at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
This coordination is usually carried out by circuits in the spine, which control walking once it has been initiated by the brain – as happens in headless chickens. Courtine’s team has found a way to exploit this using spine implants in monkeys.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ne...to-let-paralysed-monkeys-move-their-legs/amp/
This coordination is usually carried out by circuits in the spine, which control walking once it has been initiated by the brain – as happens in headless chickens. Courtine’s team has found a way to exploit this using spine implants in monkeys.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ne...to-let-paralysed-monkeys-move-their-legs/amp/
