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摘要

Using nothing but the power of thought, monkeys have been able to control an object in three dimensions as smoothly as if they were moving it with their own hands. The breakthrough, which could lead to artificial limbs controlled directly by the brain, reveals that visual feedback plays a crucial role in training the brain to do this. Andrew Schwartz and his colleagues at Arizona State University in Tempe and the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, started off by training rhesus macaques to use their hands to track a moving target. The monkeys were wearing a virtual reality headset, so they couldn't see their hands. Instead, the position of their hands was represented by a coloured cursor that followed the target.