A 5/18/23 article has been presented by William a. haseltine entitled “you can now control a wheelchair with your brain waves alone.” the research work he discussed “used a sensorimotor rhythm-based brain-machine interface to drive an intelligent robotic wheelchair and tested the robotic wheelchairs on three patients who were effectively paralyzed from the neck down. a sensorimotor rhythm brain-machine interface is based on the electrical signals that are emitted from the brain when people think [bold type added in each case, here and below] about moving parts of their bodies. in this study, when the patients thought about moving both hands, the wheelchair would turn left. if they thought about moving both of their feet, the wheelchair would turn right. to move forwards, the participants would have to think of both commands at the same time. . . . during their training, patients were seated in a customized wheelchair and were asked to think about moving their hands or their feet. if their brain sensorimotor signals were properly decoded, these thoughts would cause a steering wheel in front of them to rotate to the left or to the right.”
i must add a word of caution. the researchers were at risk of attributing the thinking and all the monitored thoughts to the brain itself, discounting the role of the immaterial mind. Mortimer adler is quoted in my books as stating, and i paraphrase, that we need our brains to think, but we do not think with our brains! no, we think with our immaterial cognitive minds which generate wave forms which interact with the synaptic networks where they are linguistically encoded and transmitted through neural synaptic networks via spike trains of action potentials. in my books and blogs, i have discussed in detail the “how” of this process as it is presently understood.