They are trained by listening to a buzzer which becomes faster and louder when they are thinking along the right lines. Dr Bakay says that controlling the cursor soon becomes second nature. The first two patients, New Scientist reports, were a woman with motor neuron disease, who was given the implants 18 months ago and has since died, and a 57-year-old man paralysed by a stroke. They were taught very simple commands, with one cone being used to move the cursor up and down and the other from left to right. If they could give more complex commands, disabled people could use them to make the computer speak for them. Dr Bakay warns that this could still be years off. But he has secured funding from the US National Institutes of Health to continue the research with three more patients. The British Telecom laboratories near Ipswich have also done research into implantable chips, including a possible memory chip which would take data from the eye and store it for a computer. "There is a raft of wonderful benefits to bringing chips and circuits inside human beings," said Dr Peter Cochrane, head of research. ............................................................ Communicating with 'thought power' "Bionic brain implants allowing a computer to be operated by the power of thought, have been developed by American scientists," reports BBC News. Read all about it here: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/ sci/tech/newsid_193000/193946.stm The BBC report states that "the [brain] implant becomes naturally 'wired' into the patient's brain as neurones grow into the cones and attach themselves to the electrodes mounted inside," and that "An FM transmitter under the scalp transmits the signal without wires, and...no batteries," to operate the cursor on a computer... hard to believe! Up to Contents -111-