The Nervous System

"From an engineering standpoint, this is the greatest challenge one can imagine: trying to restore the most incredible machine in the universe." -Todd Kuiken

So in case you haven't figured it out yet "the most incredible machine in the universe" is the brain and nervous system. The most fascinating yet most unknown machines of all. Our brain powers our body and can remeber incredible things with breathtaking precision. Speaking of breathing, our brain controls that too. It is absolutely amazing.  I think what Todd Kuiken was trying to say that the nervous system is so complex and fragile and everything has to be in the correct place for it to work properly. It is so complex that if an engineer where to tackle the daunting task of restoring it, or perhaps, creating it, it would be one of the biggest challenges in all of history. This quote was an analogy to put in perspective the utter magnificence of the human nervous system. 

Now if you really think about it, the brain is really "the most incredible machine in the universe."  Lets take for example the lab we did in class today. It was to test reaction time by having one person drop a meter stick while the other person catches it with their fingers. Well how did you catch it? Well you had a visual input of the meterstick dropping. This signal was sent to the brain. Then your brain processes the picture of it dropping and has to decide what to do. It needs to catch it. So your brain then sends a response to your hand to tell it to catch the falling meterstick. Now keep in mind this all happens in the matter of a few milliseconds. Isn't it crazy how your brain did that. Now think about this, you were probably imagining this happening in your head or recalling the memory of you doing it. AND you were also reading and comprehending this text while breathing, blinking, and your heart beating. Thats a lot of multitasking if you ask me. If you find a machine that can do all of that you let me know.

So after watching Todd Kuiken's TED Talk, his work is so awe-inspiring. He is helping people with prosthetic limbs use them on a level that is close to that of a real limbs function. The best part is, they don't have to touch buttons or move them manually, it is like they never lost their arm, they literally do exactly what you would do to move your arm. When you clench your hand your brain sends nerve signals to do that. So does hers. This new ingenious idea where you would transfer the arm nerves to the pectoral muscles and let them grow as regular arm nerves and use them to create these actions. The pectoral muscle now contracts in weird ways that the prosthetic detects as a certain type of movement that in turn makes the prosthetic complete a task. They are emerging on an even bigger idea to embellish the already amazing prosthetic. They are trying to not just send signals to the prosthetic, but for the prosthetic to produce feedback to the brain so we can feel hot and cold, sharp and dull, or smooth and bumpy.  They have a base for it. It requires stimulation to the pectoral area that corresponds to a certain part of the arm or hand. It also requires being connected to many electrodes that are still on a computer in the alpha stage. But pretty soon if they continue advancing through the technology, we may see a prosthetic arm that you couldn't tell apart from a real arm at all in the future. 

So the question you may be wondering is how is this important to the nervous system. Well the nervous system is our body's way of interacting within itself and with the outside world. This new technology harnesses the power of the nervous system and uses it to its advantage by allowing prosthetics to respond to messages from the brain like a regular arm. The nervous system that is very complex and nearly impossible to understand has been "tapped into" by prosthetics. The intricately complicated system of the brain and body relationship is being learned about and applied to modern medicine to benefit humanity.