Designing Brain-Computer Interfaces That Connect Neurons to the Digital World

Twenty years after meeting at HMS, two alumni are at the leading edge of efforts to use minimally invasive neural implants to improve human health.

Craig Mermel, MD ’12 PhD ’10, was nervously waiting for his HMS entrance interview when a newspaper headline about the Mars Rover caught his eye. It was January 2004, and the spacecraft had just capped a seven-month voyage by landing on the red planet. The news sparked a conversation between Mermel and another jittery applicant — Ben Rapoport, MD ’13 — who was sitting nearby in the Dean’s lounge at Gordon Hall. “I remember thinking it was nice to have a distraction,” Mermel says. “Then we each got called into our interviews, and I thought, ‘Probably won’t see him again.’ ”

Mermel thought wrong. Twenty years after they were accepted to the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program, the longtime collaborators are leading efforts to create brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that connect neurons to the digital world. Modern electrode arrays can tune in to the activity of “hundreds or thousands of neurons at a time,” says Rapoport, now a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. By decoding how intentional signaling in the brain gives rise to corresponding physical movements, scientists can design systems that allow people to operate computers with their thoughts alone.

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