Miguel Nicolelis Quotes

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

- Miguel Nicolelis

We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.

- Miguel Nicolelis

I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.

- Miguel Nicolelis

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

- Miguel Nicolelis

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

- Miguel Nicolelis

It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.

- Miguel Nicolelis

Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.

- Miguel Nicolelis

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

- Miguel Nicolelis

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

- Miguel Nicolelis

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.

- Miguel Nicolelis

Eventually, brain implants will become as common as heart implants. I have no doubt about that.

- Miguel Nicolelis

There are several patients - there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson's disease.

- Miguel Nicolelis

The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.

- Miguel Nicolelis

We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.

- Miguel Nicolelis

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

- Miguel Nicolelis

I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.

- Miguel Nicolelis

We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.

- Miguel Nicolelis

It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

- Miguel Nicolelis

We want kids to think that they can think about science. They don't need to just play soccer.

- Miguel Nicolelis