I’ve been waiting for this article from my physical copy of Wired Mag to come out online so I could link to it. This is some incredible stuff.

Matthew Nagle is beating me at Pong. “O, baby,” he mutters. The creases in his forehead deepen as he moves the onscreen paddle to block the ball. “C’mon - here you go,” he says, sending a wicked angle shot ricocheting down the screen and past my defense. “Yes!” he says in triumph, his voice hoarse from the ventilator that helps him breathe. “Let’s go again, dude.”

The remarkable thing about Nagle is not that he plays skillfully; it’s that he can play at all. Nagle is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a stabbing three years ago. He pilots a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube, his pale hands strapped to the armrests. He’s playing Pong with his thoughts alone.

UPDATE: I just had to post one more paragraph. This is the sort of stuff that just makes me shake my head in amazement…

Other researchers were chasing the same goal. In 2002, Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke, provided the best evidence yet of the brain’s plasticity. He and his team plugged 86 microwires into the brain of a monkey and taught the animal to use a joystick to move an onscreen cursor (the reward: a sip of juice). After the computer had learned to interpret the animal’s brain activity, Nicolelis disconnected the joystick. For a while, the monkey kept working it. But he eventually figured it out. The monkey dropped the joystick and stopped moving his arm; the cursor still moved to the target. As the monkey calmly downed another swallow of juice, Nicolelis’ lab fell silent in awe. The mammalian brain could assimilate a device - a machine.