Completely Locked-In Patient Manages to Communicate

Researchers used brain implants that allowed him to select one letter every minute
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 23, 2022 10:30 AM CDT
Man Whose Paralysis Extends to His Eyes Can Communicate
Stock photo of a patient in a hospital bed.   (Getty Images)

The New York Times describes Dr. Ujwal Chaudhary and Dr. Niels Birbaumer as "dumbstruck" by the outcome of an experiment they conducted in 2020. It's an understandable reaction. Then colleagues at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, the men employed brain implants that allowed a then-34-year-old patient with completely locked-in state (CLIS)—a man whose paralysis now extends even to his eyeballs—to select letters and build sentences using only his thoughts. The Guardian provides the backstory: In 2017, a few patients with CLIS were paired with technology that had 70% accuracy and allowed them to answer "yes" or "no" to questions. The man's parents read about the study and wrote to the team, asking for help with their son.

He still retained the ability to move his eyes at the time, and he used them to communicate consent to the more aggressive—and potentially accurate—path that was suggested: implanting two microelectrode arrays in the parts of his brain related to planning and controlling voluntary movements. He was then taught by the researchers "how to generate brain activity that could alter the frequency of a sound wave." Once he could do that, he applied the same activity to a spelling program, selecting a letter at a rate of about one per minute. Slow as that may seem, "if you have a choice of no communication, and a communication of one character per minute, the choice is very obvious," Chaudhary says.

Among the things the patient has spelled out, per the study published in Nature Communications: instructions about his care ("first of all head position very high from now" and "everybody must use gel on my eye more often"), entertainment ("I would like to listen to the album by Tool loud"), and messages to his family, including asking whether his young son wanted to watch Disney movies with him. Chaudhary notes it gives great insight into what the quality of life is like for someone with CLIS, per the Guardian. "If someone is forming sentences like this, I would say it is positive. Even if it is not positive, it is not negative."

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But the Times also delves into another backstory, pointing out that Chaudhary and Birbaumer were found by the German Research Foundation to have committed scientific misconduct in connection with their earlier CLIS studies; Birbaumer has sued. The Times speaks with researchers not tied to the current study who variously say it "is a solid study" and "should be taken with a massive mountain of salt given [Birbaumer's] history." (More discoveries stories.)

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