Understanding Paralysis

Have you ever been with someone who has been suffering through paralysis or at least experienced someone going through that phase of life? It’s really hard to even imagine someone to be in that condition not just because of the physical disabilities that are involved but also because of the psychological stress that the victim goes through. Understanding ‘Paralysis’: Basically paralysis is a condition where there is either loss or impairment of voluntary muscular movement in our body because of some disturbances in the neuromuscular functions. In simple words, it’s our brain that commands each and every muscle of our body to make a movement or perform different tasks. The communication between our brain and the respective muscles are done …show more content…

Now the question comes what was the reason behind the recovery? Well, the body of the rat got adapted to the injury through exercises and then some of the unaffected nerves around the injured area reorganized restarted sending signals between brain and legs. Results of Experiments on Humans: Once the rat experiment finished, he further tried to optimize his technology. Those implants were made after a membrane called Dura mater which covers the spinal cord and brain. The next step was to implement it on humans. The implementation was done on a man who was partially paralyzed because of an injury to his spinal cord 5 years before the implant. Those electrodes were implanted on the surface of the lower spinal cord just below the affected area. He was able to walk with the help of a support but once the electrode implants were implemented and the simulation was started his movement control was drastically improved. However it’s the latest technical innovation in the field of reverse paralysis that has again brought Courtine into …show more content…

The first implant was a brain reading chip with micro electrode array that was placed at the leg area of the motor cortex of the monkey’s brain. This chip has around 100 electrodes in it. Those who don’t know, motor cortex is the area in our brain where planning and execution of all voluntary movements in our body is done. How it works? The brain reading chip was placed there just to read the signals from the motor cortex. Once the motor cortex starts sending signals, the chip will capture the signals from all the neurons by recording the spiking activities of the motor cortex and then will send them to an external computer. The brain reading chip has been developed in such a way that it can read the motor cortex signals at a rapid speed to avoid delay in the process. This external computer is a signal decoder which decodes the signals from the motor cortex in a real time scenario. The second implant is a pulse generator simulator and has wireless triggering capabilities. The pulse generator is implanted at affected