Thoughts turn to motion for patients with implant

For a little more than a year, Matthew Nagle of Weymouth, who is paralyzed from the neck down, was able to play computer video games, change the channel on his TV set, and open and close a robotic hand just by looking and thinking.

``When I wanted it to close, the hand would close. When I wanted it to open, the hand would open. That was cool -- that was probably one of the highlights," said Nagle, 26, who was injured in a knife attack in 2001 .

Nagle is one of four people who have received an experimental brain implant that turned their thoughts of motion into actual movements.

The research into their experiences has been reported before in the popular media, but yesterday, it became the cover story in Nature, its first appearance in the kind of peer-reviewed journal that provides scientific legitimacy. The report describes the tests that led researchers to conclude that even years after an injury, it is possible to harness signals from a part of the brain that controls movement, using a tiny array of electrodes implanted directly into a paralyzed person's head.

The Nature paper notes that the BrainGate implant and similar devices have a long way to go before they can help more people like Nagle , who received the implant in 2004 . Though the array itself is only the size of a baby aspirin, it must be tethered to a cart of electronic equipment to decode and translate signals from the brain. A technician is also required, and the device cannot be on all the time.

The BrainGate implant faces competition from other devices aimed at giving paralyzed people more control of their bodies , including methods that draw input from the surface of the scalp rather than inside the brain. They are part of a surge of scientific efforts to fight paralysis using new techniques ranging from stem cells to drugs.

The Nature report mentions problems with some of the signals coming from BrainGate's implanted electrodes, both in Nagle and in a second patient who has not been publicly identified, though the device continued to work. Those problems appear to be technological bugs rather than signs of a hostile biological response of the body, which would have been much harder to solve, said John P. Donoghue of Brown University, the paper's senior author, in a telephone interview.

Donoghue is also a founder of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc., a Foxborough company that is running a clinical trial of the device on four patients -- three are quadriplegic and one has Lou Gehrig's d isease .

Donoghue's team is also working on a project with researchers who specialize in using electrical stimulation to make the muscles contract in paralyzed limbs, a treatment that the late actor Christopher Reeve received. The hope, Donoghue said, is to link the brain output from the BrainGate to electrical stimulation and ``reanimate the paralyzed limb."

Nagle, the first patient, had the BrainGate array in his brain for about 13 months, he said in a phone interview this week from New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, where he lives.

He had it removed in mid-2005 because he wanted to try a different experimental treatment: an operation that would allow him to breathe without the help of a ventilator. That treatment worked, and he has now been breathing on his own for months.

Nagle found that with BrainGate, he could control his TV set -- channels and volume -- and play games like Tetris and Pong.

Would he like to have BrainGate re implanted some time?

``There are options I have, and that's one of the options," he said. ``They're doing a lot of things for research and I'd like to better my situation. Whatever can better the situation, I'm going to get there first -- whether it's BrainGate, whether it's stem cells, whether it's something else."