Miguel Nicolelis will present at TEDMED 2012 at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC on Wednesday, April 11th, during the 5th session from 5:00 - 6:45 pm. The title of his talk is "Can we move beyond the machine-brain barrier?" and will be simulcast via the Duke School of Medicine Website.

Miguel Nicolelis was recognized in the online version of Science for contributions to Brazilian Brain Research.

By Duke Medicine News and Communications

In a first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body, two monkeys trained at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and identify the texture of virtual objects.

"Someday in the near future, quadriplegic patients will take advantage of this technology not only to move their arms and hands and to walk again, but also to sense the texture of objects placed in their hands, or experience the nuances of the terrain on which they stroll with the help of a wearable robotic exoskeleton," said study leader Miguel Nicolelis, MD, PhD, professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering.

Without moving any part of their real bodies, the monkeys used their electrical brain activity to direct the virtual hands of an avatar to the surface of virtual objects and, upon contact, were able to differentiate their textures.