Greg Gage is a neuroscientist. He started out as an electrical engineer before taking a doctorate in neuroscience. Gage also co-runs a company called Backyard Brains. The aim of the company is to promote education and to entice more people into studying neuroscience. Given that an estimated 20 percent of the world will have a neurological disorder, the company argues such research is of social importance.
This was the theme of Dr. Gage’s recent TED talk (and the second time that Gage had been given the opportunity to appear on the TED channel). TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.
In the presentation, Gage outlines his latest neuroscience equipment. For this he picks out a young woman from the audience and places electrodes onto her arm. Gage then proceeds to play the neuron activity via a speaker as the woman squeezes her arm and generates motor activity.
Gage then calls on a male volunteer and connects him to a “human-to-human interface.” The young woman then uses her brain to control the arm of the man. This is performed through the transmission of electrical impulses. The remarkable feat is shown in the video below.
The educational aspect of Gage’s company involves providing similar neuroscience experiment kits for students of all ages to learn about electrophysiology. The products on offer include kits designed to let people see and hear brain signals from living neurons and devices to allow the robotic control of ordinary cockroaches (termed the “Roboroach.”) With the brain signals, the kit allows students to stimulate neurons in insects and record the resulting electrical signals on a smartphone.
With the Roboroach, those who wish to use the kit can snip the ends of a cockroach’s antennae and thread them with a wire. The wire connects to a battery pack paired with a mobile app. Once this is set up, a finger swipe sends an electrical impulse down the antennae to the insect’s nervous system, steering it left or right. This was a succesful Kickstarter project.
The approach is not without controversy, as Digital Journal reported back in 2013. Here we noted that some people were concerned about cruelty to cockroaches while others, like Michael Allen Fox of Queen’s University in Canada, thinks that the kits trivialize science for they “encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools.”
