Beyond Boundaries

“Miguel Nicolelis has produced a delightful and scientifically important work by combining stories of his life with reflections on the big questions in neuroscience. The progress he and his coworkers have made toward a future where humans can use brain activity to directly control computers and mechanical devices to restore lost motor and communication functions is both awe-inspiring and filled with hope.”—Ion Kaas, Distinguished Centennial Professor, Vanderbilt University, and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

“In this wonderfully vivid and fascinating book, Miguel Nicolelis describes a new view of the human brain, and how interfacing it to machines will have important implications for rehabilitation medicine and beyond.”—Peter Agre, M.D., 2003 Nobel laureate in chemistry and university professor and director, Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute

“Here is the seminal guide to the latest in brain-machine interfaces and the incredible potential they hold to improve the human condition. From the first moment I heard about Miguel’s groundbreaking work in the hallways of Duke University, I knew he was doing something special. At once scientifically rich and readily accessible, it inspires both curiosity and hope from one of the field’s most important thinkers.”—Bill Maris, managing partner, Google Ventures

"Beyond Boundaries is an absolute joy to read. Professor Miguel Nicolelis has provided a provocative, thoughtful, and novel view of how this amazing machine called our brain processes and acts on information about our world. Always a scientist and often a poet, Nicolelis writes in an informative and engaging style that is accessible to specialist and layman alike. I highly recommend this wonderful book."—Thomas J. Carew, Bren Professor and chair, department of neurobiology and behavior, University of California, Irvine, and former president of the Society for Neuroscience

"Nicolelis defines his field of research as systems neurophysiology, and he guides interested readers to the frontier of brain knowledge in this account of his and colleagues’ experiments. Their practical objectives are the development of a brain-machine interface and, ultimately, a brain-to-brain interface. It seems that the former has been achieved in rudimentary fashion, as Nicolelis describes his Duke University lab’s success in rigging a primate so that its brain’s neural firings actuate a robot in Japan. Many images clarify scientists’ techniques for wiring up and measuring their clinical subjects, while Nicolelis’s explanatory text regularly steers into smiting his intellectual rivals, whom Nicolelis characterizes as holding that specific locations exercise brain functions, whereas he maintains that the brain operates in a distributed way, even as a biological version of physics’s relativity. As readers mull over the debate and absorb Nicolelis’s relativity idea, his conclusion outlines optimistic visionary predictions for neuroscience that will alert them to what’s coming down the pike in technology-driven human evolution."—Booklist