Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

This by itself will be a huge advance in medical technology when it is ready for prime-time.

But wait, there’s more.

Not only have they been able to re-connect the existing brain cells that control, say, a wrist to the muscles in that area, but they found that the monkey could retrain other brain cells to do the same thing.

The most surprising outcome of their experiments is the revelation that motor cortex cells that had previously been dedicated to moving, say, the big toe on a monkey’s left foot or bending its knees could be trained to control its wrists. This flexibility, says Fetz, may allow patients with head injuries that damaged part of the cerebral cortex to still be candidates for a neuroprosthesis.

It’s hard to even imagine the kind of impact this kind of research will have in the future.