For eighteen years, Jan Scheuermann has been paralyzed from the neck down. She is six feet tall, and she spends all day and all night in a sophisticated, battery-powered wheelchair that cradles her—half sitting, half reclining—from head to toe. In effect, the chair has become an extension of her body. To navigate the world in it, Scheuermann manipulates a cork-tipped joystick with her chin. She can move in this way with remarkable agility, but her height, combined with the bulk of the chair and the unrelenting nature of gravity and matter, can limit her. Over the phone, though, it is possible to not ever think of her paralysis. She has a soft voice, a wry sense of humor, and a warm, gentle manner. Sometimes when she speaks she pauses to inhale; the deliberate breaths are necessary because her lungs do not automatically pull in enough air, but a listener tends not to notice them. Across a fibre-optic network, her words are converted into weightless digital information. She floats to you.

When I first met Scheuermann, it was by phone. I had called her at home, in Pittsburgh, after learning that she had participated in a neuroscience experiment that allowed her to partially escape the confines of her paralyzed body. Scheuermann is one of a very few Americans to have experienced a direct brain-computer interface, a complex assemblage of technology—transistor-like cortical implants, wires, algorithmic decoders, robotics, all in their early stages of development—designed to fuse minds with machines. For decades, the idea of plugging a brain into a computer has been a mainstay of cyberpunk fiction, not biotechnology. (“I jack in and I’m not here,” a character explains in William Gibson’s 1984 novel, “Neuromancer.”) The human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. A single brain contains more electrical connections than there are galaxies in space. Understanding the behavior of its eighty-six billion neurons is as formidable a scientific challenge as interstellar travel.

…continue reading ‘Degrees of Freedom’

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