May 2013
2 posts
"Meteor Of The Mind" - Visioneering 2013 Prize... →
“Meteor Of The Mind” is a prize concept pitch to create a therapeutic treatment to improve cognitive function & avert the disaster of Alzheimer’s Disease. ht…
April 2013
1 post
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My team wins the Visioneering Prize for 2013 →
“Meteor of the Mind” – Therapeutic treatments to improve cognitive function and avert the disaster of Alzheimer’s Disease
December 2012
4 posts
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What if the Second Amendment Legislated Cars...
In the wake of the another mass shooting, especially in this heart breaking episode involving children, I have to ask myself what was the true intention of the Second Amendment. Not being a historian, my general impression from the encoded law “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” is that...
We just came out with an iphone app that is brain... →
St. Louis Beacon Profile - Eric Leuthardt →
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Why American Scientists Should Bet Red at Casinos....
Its sometimes hard for me to put into words the visceral pain associated with getting a grant rejected from funding agencies like the National Institute of Health (NIH). The feeling is somewhere in between getting kicked in the crotch and seeing your high school sweetheart kissing another guy. The pain and sense of betrayal runs deep and bitter. For those who don’t do science, a little...
October 2012
2 posts
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Part 1. Why markets matter to medicine
A while ago I received an email from a graduate student telling me I should, in essence, choose between academia and commercialization. That, in his words, “trying to go in both ways will make people in the academic circles concerned.” He was in fact right. Often trying to do translational work and basic science can often raise eyebrows amongst members of the strictly academic community. Why is...
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Part 2: Market Considerations for...
I went into Brain Computer Interface research with the intention of enabling spinal cord injury patients to move and locked-in patients to communicate. After working on this for 10 years it still hasn’t happened. There has been enormous excitement around the possibilities, smart people are poring into the field, and government agencies are funding the research like never before. But still – it...
July 2012
1 post
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The price of free will
Time and again I have seen the debate over nature versus nurture unfold in the courts, in media, and in classrooms when people try to articulate why a person committed a crime. Was it because they are a terrible person with malign intentions or where they the result of a lifetime of poor nurturing and abuse that manifests as a learned antisocial response that absolves them of their...
May 2012
2 posts
Single Neuron System Enable Woman to Control... →
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February 2012
1 post
Redesigning People →
January 2012
2 posts
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November 2011
1 post
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October 2011
1 post
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May 2011
4 posts
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My Book - RedDevil_4 - Now Signed With Major...
I am excited to say that my novel, RedDevil_4 was recently signed with Tor Publishing. The same group that has published Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Orson Scott Card. Below is the books summary. Hopefully it will be coming out in the summer of 2012. Stay tuned.
RedDevil_4 by Eric C. Leuthardt, MD
In the near future, when mind machine technologies have become commonplace, a series of...
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Epilepsy, monkeys with rakes, and the many...
What is the one thing that a patient with epilepsy wants? Is it for the seizures to stop? To be off the medications? The top of the list that I hear time and time again is this – to be able to drive a car. Without a doubt seizures are dangerous and socially debilitating (image going about your day to day life with the thought of abruptly losing consciousness). Due to their epilepsy, these...
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NPR Interview About Brain Computer Interfaces →
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A bio on the blogger - Eric Leuthardt →
April 2011
3 posts
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Example of someone using real and imagined speech... →
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Technique for letting brain talk to computers now... →
February 2011
1 post
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Brain’s ‘radio stations’ have much to tell... →
January 2011
1 post
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Paying Attention – The Ultimate Currency
Everybody at some point in time had somebody – a parent, a stern teacher, an irritated spouse – who would point their finger at you and say “pay attention!” Little did that person know that they were actually requesting a payment. A deposit that in a lot of ways is no different than a dollar, a nugget of gold, or wampum. A currency by definition is something that can be exchanged for goods and...
September 2010
1 post
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Why is the World Changing So Fast?
When I was a kid I used to dig holes in the backyard for entertainment – seemed like fun at the time. These days I see children the same age as my hole-digging days playing with hand held play stations, navigating the web through wirelessly connected laptops, and getting weepy when their transfer rates are too slow. Beyond this underlining that I am getting old, it also speaks to the fact that...
August 2010
3 posts
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Living In the Model Our Brain Creates
From a traditional scientific perspective, and from a basic common sense point of view, most of us assume that the world we live in is one which we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. That the environment we perceive around us is the result of our senses telling us the make up of an objective and separate reality. Certain findings, however, conflict with that very fundamental notion. Recent...
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Why did my childhood summers seem so long? Notions...
I recently watched the movie Inception. A fun science fiction movie based on the premise that people could invade another person’s mind by entering their dreams. The exact mechanism of how this was accomplished was a little fuzzy and left to artistic license. An interesting concept that was presented was that as the corporate spies went deep into the dream process that time began to extend. A...
July 2010
6 posts
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Neuroprosthetics 102: The Neural Code
Fundamentally, neuroscience strives to understand how complex cortical dynamics represent cognitive perceptions and intentions. Its one of the last mysteries of science – how does the brain work. Analogous to the gravitas and impact that bioinformatics approaches have played in genetics and understanding biologic processes, decoding how the information of human experience is represented in cortex...
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Podcast - Neuroprosthetics →
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Brain Computer Interfaces 101: The Basics
As I work to develop this blog, before I can really effectively project my ideas and thoughts on the field and where its going to the blogosphere, it is probably worth giving a “neuroprosthetics 101” lesson to get everyone up to speed as to what people are talking about when they use the terms Brain Computer Interface, Brain Machine Interface, Neuroprosthetics, and so forth.
The most honest...
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Fiction Precedes Science
I have had several conversations with people regarding recent movies such as Surrogates and Avatar. Most people treat them as fun and fanciful films about things that are far away and can never be. In truth, the likelihood that we will one day all be a society of though driven robots or that we will inhabit alien bodies is indeed low. There is something more prescient and timely about these...
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Changing Notions of Self
I remember as a child how people with tattoos were considered fringe and plastic surgery was something done for women with mastectomies or done secretly. The idea that a person could change their body was considered strange. While there are indeed people with tattoos who are sailors and freaks, and women with breast augments who are strippers and porn stars; they by no means represent the...
June 2010
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WatchA child using their brain signals to control a robotic arm.
WatchAn example of a subject using both real and imagined hand movements to play a video game.
Lecture on Brain Computer Interfaces →
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Preliminary Thoughts
I would like to introduce myself. I am Eric C. Leuthardt, MD. I have several different hats — they include being a neurosurgeon, a neuroscientist, an engineer, an entrepreenur, an inventor, and an author. As far as my background, I have been one of the first researchers to develop the ECoG Brain Computer Interface. A device that can read people’s brain signals and convert them into...
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