Nine years after a brain-stem stroke left Erik Ramsey almost totally paralysed, he is learning to talk again – starting with basic vowel sounds.
In 2004, Ramsey had an electrode implanted in his speech-motor cortex by Philip Kennedy’s team at Neural Signals in Duluth, Georgia, who hoped the signal it picked up could be used to restore his speech. Interpreting these signals proved tricky, but fortunately Frank Guenther’s team at Boston University were working on the same problem. They used information from MRI scans of healthy people to pick up activity from their brains as they controlled the position of the…
