    They are trained by listening to a buzzer which becomes
    faster and louder when they are thinking along the right
    lines.  Dr Bakay says that controlling the cursor soon
    becomes second nature.

    The first two patients, New Scientist reports, were a woman
    with motor neuron disease, who was given the implants 18
    months ago and has since died, and a 57-year-old man
    paralysed by a stroke.

    They were taught very simple commands, with one cone being
    used to move the cursor up and down and the other from left
    to right. If they could give more complex commands, disabled
    people could use them to make the computer speak for them. Dr
    Bakay warns that this could still be years off. But he has
    secured funding from the US National Institutes of Health to
    continue the research with three more patients.

    The British Telecom laboratories near Ipswich have also done
    research into implantable chips, including a possible memory
    chip which would take data from the eye and store it for a
    computer. "There is a raft of wonderful benefits to bringing
    chips and circuits inside human beings," said Dr Peter
    Cochrane, head of research.

    ............................................................
    Communicating with 'thought power'

    "Bionic brain implants allowing a computer to be operated
    by the power of thought, have been developed by American
    scientists," reports BBC News. Read all about it here:

    http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/
      sci/tech/newsid_193000/193946.stm

    The BBC report states that "the [brain] implant becomes
    naturally 'wired' into the patient's brain as neurones grow
    into the cones and attach themselves to the electrodes
    mounted inside," and that "An FM transmitter under the scalp
    transmits the signal without wires, and...no batteries," to
    operate the cursor on a computer...  hard to believe!

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