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Originally Posted by Oberon
I find this the most awesome part of it all:
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A group of European scientists announced in December of 2009 that they successfully connected a robotic hand to a man, Petruzziello, who had lost an arm in a car accident, allowing him to control the prosthetic with his thoughts and feel sensations in the artificial limb. The experiment lasted a month. But scientists say it marks the first time an amputee has been able to make complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanic hand connected to his nervous system.
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by chance I happen to have spoken an expert on this area about a month ago, and he was quite sceptic about these kind of things. According to him, (using the current experimental technologies) we are only able to measure very few brain responses (e.g. the so-called P300-response). Definitely not the signals used to control your hand.
So don't think of it as an artificial hand you control in exactly the same way as you would control your real hands.
It probably uses some kind of "thought code" instead, using those very few signals that are measurable. This would require extensive training before you could even wobble your little finger up and down.
A very good example of how such thing works:
it's not like you think "w" and a "w" appears on your screen. But rather you see the cursor automatically scroll through all the letters, and when it selects "w" you think "yeah that's the one!".