“Can we use our brains to directly control machines — without requiring a body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people — and maybe for all of us.”

Filmed April 2012 at TEDMED 2012
Uploaded to YouTube on February 18, 2013 by TED