People who have been paralysed for years have the same brain activity as
healthy people when they try to move their limbs. It might mean that implants
that bypass spinal damage could one day let them drive wheelchairs, move cursors
and regain bladder control.
Richard Normann at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his team
developed a way of tapping into neurons and interpreting their instructions. But
they didn’t know how much the brain would reorganise itself after someone was
paralysed. To find out, they scanned five people, who’d been paralysed for up to
five years, as…
