Miguel Nicolelis Quotes

We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.

You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.

We want to galvanize people’s imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.

There are several patients – there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson’s disease.

It’s the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It’s never been done before.

I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms – brainstorms, that is.

Even two of humanity’s most intimate possessions – a sense of self and a body image – are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain’s mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second’s notice.

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman’s paintings to Mozart’s symphonies and Einstein’s view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

We want kids to think that they can think about science. They don’t need to just play soccer.

Impossible is just the possible that someone has not put enough effort to make it come true.

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

Eventually, brain implants will become as common as heart implants. I have no doubt about that.

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it’s not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that’s very intriguing.