His wife and sister provided written consent for the surgery.Ĭonsent for this type of study comes with ethical challenges, says Eran Klein, a neurologist and neuroethicist at the University of Washington, Seattle. He told the team he wanted an invasive implant to try to maintain communication with his family, including his young son. The participant in the new study, a man with ALS who is now 36, started to work with a research team at the University of Tübingen in 2018, when he could still move his eyes. It wasn’t clear whether a brain that has lost all control over the body can signal intended movements consistently enough to allow meaningful communication.

But this person still had minimal control of some eye and mouth muscles. In 2016, Vansteensel’s team reported that a woman with ALS could spell out sentences with a brain implant that detected attempts to move her hand. But if a person chooses to prolong their life with a ventilator, they may spend months or years able to hear but not communicate. Later in the disease’s progression, they can answer yes-or-no questions with subtle eye movements. When a person with ALS can no longer speak, they can use an eye-tracking camera to select letters on a screen. If the new spelling system proves reliable for all people who are completely locked in-and if it can be made more efficient and affordable-it might allow thousands of people to reconnect to their families and care teams, says Reinhold Scherer, a neural engineer at the University of Essex.ĪLS destroys the nerves that control movement, and most patients die within 5 years of diagnosis.

“People have really doubted whether this was even feasible,” says Mariska Vansteensel, a brain-computer interface researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht who was not involved in the study, published in Nature Communications. But with the help of an implanted device that reads his brain signals, a man in this “complete” locked-in state could select letters and form sentences, researchers report this week. People lose control of their muscles, and communication may become impossible. In its final stages, the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can bring extreme isolation.

Mind lock spell