dr. john donoghue at brown university, scientists are actually working to physically and directly hard wire the brain to the external world with the brain gate pushing the boundaries of the possible. donoghue: brain gate is a type of neural interface that is designed to restore communication and mobility between the brain and the outside world for people who have tetraplegia, or paralysis. what brain gate does to take signals from the brain to the outside world is it starts with a tiny sensor a tiny chip about the size of a baby aspirin that's implanted onto the surface of the brain that picks up neural signals called action potentials. and these electrical impulses come outside through a plug on the head, currently that goes out to a cartful of electronics that processes the signals and interprets them or decodes them and transforms them into a command signal and the simplest one is you think about moving your hand control a mouse, signal left or go right and those signals come out of your brain and the computer interprets them as mouse commands for a computer and a cursor on the screen go