BIF-2 Alert: John Donoghue's Interection of Disciplines

Anyone see the cover of the New York Times yesterday? Headline: Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor. This is big news. A team led by Brown University researcher and BIF-2 storyteller John Donoghue actually turned thoughts into action. Their results, published in this month's Nature, show how a tiny new brain sensor allowed a quadriplegic to open a prosthetic hand, control a robotic limb and move a computer cursor – using thoughts alone.

Beyond being just so darn cool, Donoghue's accomplishment represents collaborative innovation in action. Fellow BIF-2 storyteller Frans Johansson calls it 'The Medici Effect'- a convergence among disciplines reflective of an increasingly interconnected world where concepts that appear to be unrelated actually are related.

Johansson, who wrote about Donoghue's experiment back when the guinea pigs were rhesus monkeys, says,

This story is especially compelling not just because of what the team of scients discovered, but also because it was a result of a deliberate effort to find an intersection of disciplines. The group behind this particular breakthrough consisted of mathematicians, medical doctors, neuroscientists and computer scientists, all playing crucial rolls in understanding how the brain works.

For Donoghue and his team, their discovery could not have happened without embracing a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to experimentation. Frankly, I can't wait to hear him share his story at our summit in October.

Related Links: Head here for more details on John Donoghue's discovery. And for more information about BIF-2 visit here.

Posted July 14, 2006 10:59 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink