To somebody peeking into this little room, I’m just a middle-aged guy wearing a polka-dotted blue shower cap with a bundle of wires sticking out the top, relaxing in a recliner while staring at a computer screen.

But in my mind’s eye, I’m a teenager sitting bolt upright on the black piano bench of my boyhood home, expertly pounding out the stirring opening chords of Chopin’s “Military Polonaise.”

Not that I’ve ever actually played that well. But there’s a little red box motoring across that computer screen, and I’m hoping my fantasy will change my brain waves just enough to make the box rise and hit a target in the other corner of the screen.

Some people have learned to hit such targets better than 90 percent of the time. During this, my first of 12 training sessions, I succeed 58 percent of the time.

But my targets are so big that I could have reached 50 percent by random chance alone.

Bottom line: Over the past half-hour, I’ve displayed just a bit more mental prowess than you’d expect from a bowl of Froot Loops.

Trying to control a computer with help from a blue shower cap is one of the early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environments literally without moving a muscle.

Most dramatically, that could help “locked-in” patients, or those who’ve lost all muscle movement because of conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease or brainstem strokes.

Research into harnessing brain signals goes back some 20 years. But lately it seems the research pot is starting to come to a boil, as advances in brain science, electronics and computer software have combined to push the field forward.

In fact, far more than half the scientific reports ever published in this area have appeared in the last three years alone, says researcher Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw. And while only about a half-dozen labs seriously worked in the field as late as the mid-1990s, now about 60 labs have gotten into it, he said.

“The field, in the last four or five years, has kind of exploded,” he said.

Anne Foerst, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York and former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Gods and Computers” project, said she’s “all for” this type of technology but that the human brain can’t be reduced to “machine status.”

However, the technology shows that brains indeed work with electrical signals and can be tested and interfaced with computers, Foerst said.

“I have long argued that we are bodies and that these bodies are biological systems. I have often argued against the notion that there is something empirical in us that makes us special,” she said. But that doesn’t diminish human spirit, she said, adding, “For me, this technology is not threatening.”

A computer (and brain’s) hardwiring

To see firsthand what all the excitement is about, I signed on as an able-bodied research subject at Wolpaw’s Brain-Computer Interface lab, part of the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health.

That blue shower cap is actually stretchable nylon mesh, polka-dotted with 64 round white electrodes that eavesdrop on the electrical activity near the surface of my brain. They pass their measurements to a computer, which calculates the strength of one particular rhythm, called the beta rhythm. And the computer tells that little red box to either rise or fall, depending on how strong my beta rhythm is from moment to moment.

My job, then, is to learn to control the strength of my beta rhythm — a body activity I didn’t even know I had until a few weeks before walking into Wolpaw’s lab.

I do know the beta rhythm is an “idling” rhythm, sort of like engine noise, with no particular function in normal life. It’s coming from the portion of my brain that tells limbs to move and receives information related to movement. And it should get weaker when I imagine moving.

So on the first day, Bill Sarnacki, the senior research technician who will guide me through the training, suggests that when the computer tells me to aim at the lower target I should let my mind go blank to make the little red box fall. When I’m supposed to aim at the upper target, I should imagine moving my hands to make the box rise.

Which is why my personal foray into neuroscience begins to the music of Chopin.

Usually, under my uncertain command, the red box flits across the screen like a butterfly buffeted by a summer breeze, its destination in doubt until the last instant.

But not when I’m at my best. I can make it glide upward like a balloon or even jump like I’d punted it. And when I aim at the lower target, the box bumps its way downward, sometimes even dropping and running like a fumbled nickel.

What does that kind of control feel like?

Imagine you’re a mediocre bowler. Imagine you’ve just released the ball, and in those long seconds as it approaches the pins it wanders toward the gutter and you’re mentally telling it, “Get back! Get back there!”

And now imagine that it does.

Unlocking “locked-in” patients

Some scientists envision taking the use of brain signals way beyond what’s been done so far.

John Donoghue, chair of Brown University’s neuroscience department and chief science officer of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., talks about giving disabled people use of their arms and legs by using brain signals to drive their muscles.

Eventually, paralyzed people might even wear lightweight mechanical arms and legs that fit over their own limbs and would enable them to walk and reach for things, says Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University, who calls such devices “wearable robots.” Nicolelis has done robot-arm work in monkeys and hopes to start studies in severely paralyzed people this year.

And Dr. Philip Kennedy of Neural Signals Inc. in Atlanta, who has tested brain sensors in seven locked-in patients since 1996, ponders the notion of helping such people speak someday. That would require planting electrodes in speech areas of the brain to give people control over 30 or so speech sounds, which would be produced by a synthesizer.

“It’s not an insurmountable problem,” Kennedy said.

That would be a huge jump from today’s brain-controlled programs that can spell out words, but only a few letters per minute.

But even a relatively slow spelling device could make a huge difference to people with no good alternative to communicate, says Dr. Terry D. Heiman-Patterson. She is working with Wolpaw’s laboratory on a project with her Lou Gehrig’s disease patients at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

That disease, formally called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, gradually robs people of their ability to use their muscles. Eventually their breathing muscles stop working, and late-stage patients have to decide whether to go on a ventilator to stay alive.

“One of the reasons people choose to die over live is that they can no longer communicate,” Heiman-Patterson said. “If we can unlock the ability to communicate with others ... we may be able to change some of the choices people are making.”

Even for people who can blink or direct their gaze to send signals, it may take 20 laborious minutes to ask to be taken to the bathroom or be turned over, she said. “The difficulty becomes so great just to do that,” she said, “that people say, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore.”’

Foerst said the innovation of brain-computer interface technology lies in overcoming these obstacles to reach full human potential. “What makes us humans special is our relationality: our uncanny capability to interact and to empathize with one another. Here, such a technology can help as it enables people to enter relationships that couldn’t do so before because of bodily limits,” said Foerst.

Enter the surgical solution

There might be an easier way to do this, if you’re willing to have surgery.

When surgeons at Washington University in St. Louis, in cooperation with Wolpaw, placed tiny electrodes on the surface of the brains of four people recently, they achieved accuracies of 74 percent to 100 percent with just three to 24 minutes of training.

Some researchers put electrodes into the brain. Donoghue’s Cyberkinetics system includes a chip about the size of a baby aspirin with 100 wire-like sensors, each thinner than a hair. The chip goes on the surface of the brain and the sensors extend about .04 inch below the surface.

Rather than monitor brain waves, the device intercepts a sample of the very signals that command arm movement, Donoghue said. So a patient doesn’t have to learn how to control his brain waves, he just has to imagine moving his arm. “At that point,” Donoghue said, “it works.”

That’s been the experience with the quadriplegic volunteer in Massachusetts, who showed he could move a cursor around a screen effectively, though less smoothly than healthy people can, Donoghue said. Cyberkinetics hopes to try its “BrainGate” system in four more patients this year and bring a product to market by 2007 or 2008.

Scientists who study implanted devices say scalp recordings like Wolpaw’s just couldn’t provide enough detailed information from the brain for elaborate control and natural movement of robotic arms or reanimated human limbs.

Researcher Andrew Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh notes that his monkeys can move a cursor or a robot arm in three dimensions, while Wolpaw’s subjects can so far operate a cursor only in two dimensions. Schwartz also questions how consistently people can stay “in the zone” of peak performance with scalp recordings.

Wolpaw, for his part, says implanted electrodes don’t pick up all the brain’s signals for movement. It’s like trying to play a symphony with only violins, he says. “You’re using the violins alone to control the output,” he said. “How well that will work remains to be seen.”

What’s more, he says, signals from implanted electrodes might be diminished over time by scar tissue, dying brain cells and slight displacements within the brain. As for staying in the zone, he said, that gets easier with practice. Right now, consistency is an issue with all the brain-signal approaches, he said.

He said he can’t think of any task that shouldn’t be achievable someday with scalp electrodes, in combination with some sophisticated software to handle the details. And while scalp electrodes haven’t yet shown they can do everything implanted ones can, he said, they’ve already come pretty close.

“We may not have the same batting average,” he said, but “we’re playing in the same league.”

Malcolm Ritter is a science writer for The Associated Press.
Science & Theology News Science Editor Julia C. Keller contributed to this report.