Matt Angle:

Welcome back to Neurotech Pub. Today, we have a special surprise. We've kidnapped Taryn Southern, the creative director at Blackrock Neuro. She actually had no idea what she was walking into when she came to visit the office today, but she's co-hosting with me.

Taryn Southern:

Aww, thank you. It's so good to be here and to finally get to step foot in the Paradromics offices as well. And I'm the creative director at Blackrock Neurotech, which basically means I oversee content and creative, brand and communication strategy. This is a really fun time to be telling stories in our field. And I think that you've done an excellent job of educating people in a really fun, easy to digest way, Matt, with this podcast. So I'm very happy to be part of it and happy to have three of my favorite individuals having joined us.

Matt Angle:

Yeah. So maybe we should talk about our guests today. One of them is Ian Burkhart, who I had the pleasure of knowing before the podcast was recorded. He's a research consultant, speaker, advocate. He's the founder of the Ian Burkhart Foundation that helps people with spinal cord injuries to make changes in their lives and get access to things that sort of help them with mobility assistance and cutting edge treatments and assistive technologies. He's also the VP of the North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium. And I think Taryn, you were saying he has a new thing going on too.

Taryn Southern:

Yeah. He wanted me to add he founded a group called the BCI Pioneers Coalition, which is an independent group that consists of research participants in the BCI space who will be getting together quarterly and through an online forum to discuss certain issues specific to research participants and share those insights with the larger neurotech industry. So you can check them out at bcipioneers.org. Really excited to see what comes out of that group.

Matt Angle:

And you know Jan and Nathan better than I do, so maybe I'll let you introduce them.

Taryn Southern:

Great. Yes. So Nathan is a neurotech consultant. He's also a speaker and an artist. One of the things I love about Nathan is just how curious he is in applying his BCI towards a lot of different endeavors, including creating art. So you might have seen him featured in publications like Wired, MIT Tech Review. He's been in NPR, Fortune, the Atlantic. He's a super creative, interesting guy, so excited to have him here.

Matt Angle:

Nathan told us about his artwork that he's selling. I believe that they're NFTs.

Taryn Southern:

Yeah. I mean, I think generally speaking, it's going to be so exciting to see how patients or prospective research participants will use these devices, particularly as portable systems become more readily available. Nathan was one of the first people to even have access to a portable system and hopefully that will just continue and scale, but it was really fun to hear about his experiences. We also had Jan on the podcast, she's an author and public speaker. She's spoken at DARPA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the National Convention of the ALS Association about her experience as a BCI trial participant at PIT. She's also the author of a fictional mystery novel, which is available on Amazon. So a really creative group that we have.

Matt Angle:

Yeah, that title is Sharp as a Cucumber. So Taryn, I'm curious, you knew all three of them before you recorded. Was there anything you learned that was new in this conversation?

Taryn Southern:

There was because of course you brought up so many interesting questions that I just hadn't thought to ask them previously. So I think specifically I was really excited by... Actually, by the way, all three of them spoke about kind of the sensorial experience of using the device. I thought that was really, really interesting and I hadn't really heard them describe it in those terms. And then there were just other personal life stories that hadn't hit my radar before.

Matt Angle:

I thought it was really cool that to contrast how Jan and Nathan looked at the device, because Jan, it was very personal. She had named her robotic arm and she really connected with it and Nathan was just kind of like, "Yeah, you know, it's there."

Taryn Southern:

So true. So true. I mean, I think all three of them had pretty distinctive views about their devices and also just about the future of these devices in general. So we were fortunate enough to get enough content for how many episodes, Matt?

Matt Angle:

Two episodes.

Taryn Southern:

Wow.

Matt Angle:

We got some feedback that these episodes are too damn long.

Taryn Southern:

Yeah.

Matt Angle:

So we started cutting them up.

Taryn Southern:

Okay, great.

Matt Angle:

You know, the other thing, I think the thing that most people who are in the field really appreciate, but I think a lot of investors that I've met or just members of the general public don't appreciate as much is that the spectrum of how people want to engage with technology ranges broadly. That was something that Ian pointed out and something you got a sense for just from talking with Ian, Nathan, and Jan. And I think that's really useful to take into account when you're building these devices and yeah, you really need to kind of talk with a lot of people and get a really good representative sample of how different people might want to use the same device or not use it.

Taryn Southern:

I agree completely.

Matt Angle:

This interview is going to be released in two parts. If you want to keep up with the release of episode two, follow us on Twitter at Neurotech Pub and you can find out when the next half is coming out.

Taryn Southern:

And definitely subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever Matt wants you to find it. And of course, if you want to find Paradromics or Blackrock Neurotech on social, we're on all the social medias. And please check out the show notes for references, details, and where to find Ian, Jan, and Nathan's work. Don't forget to also stop by bcipioneers.org to support them in their efforts to educate the public on BCI awareness.

Matt Angle:

Thanks a lot for joining us and I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.

Taryn Southern:

Thank you all for being here. And I'm excited because this is the first time that the three of you are all in the same virtual room together. Well, I think it would be nice to introduce our three lovely guests, Ian, Jan, and Nathan, who are incredible pioneers in the BCI space and have all had significant, remarkable achievements with their respective BCIs. So maybe it would be wonderful to hear a little bit from each one of you about how you initially became part of this community and some of the significant milestones that you're known for. Jan, should we start with you?

Jan Scheuermann:

I think so. Chronologically, I think I was first.

Taryn Southern:

That's right. You were first.

Jan Scheuermann:

Yeah. I'm Jan Scheuermann in Pittsburgh, PA. In October, 2011, I saw a video about a guy at the University of Pittsburgh to do this study. They moved an electronic arm with his brain. His name was Tim Hemmes. He only had an implant for 30 days, but my attendant and I watched this video and were just so excited. And I kept thinking, "Oh, I wish I could do that." At the end of the video, it said, "Volunteers, please call." I said to Karina, my attendant, "Write the number down, write it down." And she said, "I already am. I know you." So soon as the video was over, I called and I said, "Are you the people doing the study where you move a robotic arm with your brain?" My words were just tumbling out on each other. They said, "Yeah, that's us."

Jan Scheuermann:

And I said, "Well, I'm a quadriplegic. And I want to do that." Well, first we did a couple phone interviews, make sure I qualified. Then I met with the team, including the surgeon, the doctor running the study and the... Oh, let me see, the scientist running the study. And they said yeah, I should be a good candidate. They had talked to my doctor. I had met with their staff psychiatrist. He had to make sure I was the right type of person. And they knew what I was getting in for. And I remember that first meeting, they said, "If we get you using this robotic arm, do you have a goal in mind?" Because Tim Hemmes had used it to touch his girlfriend's hand. Then she took the robotic arm as an embodiment of his hand. It was very touching.

Jan Scheuermann:

And I knew when they asked me for my goal, they wanted me say something like, "I want to hug my children," or, "I want to touch my husband's cheek." And I said, "Well, yeah, my goal is I'd like to feed myself chocolate." And I was waiting for them to laugh. Instead, they all started nodding and saying, "Yeah, we should be able to do that." So the surgery was February 10th, 10 years ago this week. So that's how I got into it.

Taryn Southern:

And Jan, how long did you have your implant for?

Jan Scheuermann:

From February until two and a half years later in October. So that's what? Two years and eight months. 32 months.

Taryn Southern:

And then which one of you comes next in the timeline? It'd be close between Ian and Nathan, but I'm guessing Ian, right? No?

Nathan Copeland:

Technically, I think my story starts before his, but because I had an explant, because the first implants were not in the ideal place, between that time Ian got his and then that's how he was a few months before me possibly, I think.

Taryn Southern:

Well, then I think technically you qualify Nathan for the second intro.

Matt Angle:

Yeah. You get to go.

Nathan Copeland:

My first implant was November... Of what? 2014. So was yours before that?

Ian Burkhart:

I was in April of 2014.

Nathan Copeland:

Okay. So you were just before me for my re-implant. So yeah, I'm Nathan Copeland and I live south of Pittsburgh and right at the same time that Jan was joining the study, I also got a phone call because I was on a research registry since in 2004, I was in a car accident and I broke my neck and I'm now a C5 quadriplegic and I got a call and they asked if I wanted to join a BCI study where I could have implants and control a robotic arm. And I said, "Yeah, that sounds really cool." And I went in for a screening and I actually didn't qualify because I had some wrist movement and that was considered significant hand function in their exclusion protocols, even though it really wasn't. I can lift my wrist up and that's it.

Nathan Copeland:

So I didn't qualify. And it was a couple years later that I was doing a different research study with people from the same lab. And they said, "You'd be good for this BCI research." And I said, "Yeah, I really wanted to do that before, but I didn't qualify it." And they said, "Oh, we've changed our protocols." And that's how I joined the BCI research study that started right after Jan's. Jan had the implants to control the robotic arm. And my study actually included two implants in sensory cortex to receive stimulation directly into my brain from the robotic hand sensors or just they can push a button on the computer and kind of zap an electrode in my brain and it feels like something coming from my own hand. And I'm actually the first human in the world to have implants in sensory cortex.

Taryn Southern:

So. Cool.

Matt Angle:

Yeah. We definitely want to ask you about that a little bit later.

Nathan Copeland:

Yeah. And so my initial implants weren't actually in the right areas. So they gave me three options and they were quit then and have an explant, continue testing for a while and they would get some data that they could and then have an explant, or continue testing and plan for a simultaneous explant and a re-implant. And my friend was with me that day and we were at a red light going home and he said, "I don't even need to ask. I already know what you're going to do." And yeah, I planned for a re-implant because I didn't feel like quitting.

Matt Angle:

When they put it in the area that they weren't targeting the first time, what area did they put it in? Do you know?

Nathan Copeland:

So everything was just skewed a little bit. So they did have some coverage of parietal cortex. Yeah, everything was just off a little bit and there's a million reasons that that could have been and I could have been a bit sleepy in the MRI and their testing was a little bit off or my brain could just be a little weird.

Matt Angle:

I was just curious. Did you do any experiments when it was in the other area?

Nathan Copeland:

So we did some stuff where they had an eye tracker and I would do the saccade movements. I'd have a board on my lap with a ring of LEDs and one would light up and I'd either follow with my eyes or just stay in the middle of target and think about it and think about moving my arm in those directions and that kind of stuff. So a little bit of stuff, I don't know whatever really came about from that.

Taryn Southern:

And Nathan, I believe you currently hold the title for longest chronic implant. Is that right?

Nathan Copeland:

I do since May 4th, 2015. So Star Wars day.

Matt Angle:

Oh, nice.

Taryn Southern:

Well, congratulations. Ian, you are up. Our second longest chronic implant title holder. Sorry. You were first for a while.

Ian Burkhart:

Yeah. So my story started relatively similar to Jan and Nathan's. I was already receiving care at the Ohio State University for my spinal cord injury that happened three years prior. And I kept asking the doctors and therapists that I was working with, "What can I look forward to? Is there anything else I can do?" Because I really wasn't settled in to where I wanted to be when insurance said, "Oh, you kind of hit everything that you're going to do for someone with your level of spinal cord injury." And I just kept bugging them as much as I could. And it worked out because I fit all the inclusion criteria for a study that they were developing at the same time to use a brain computer interface to control a muscle stimulation sleeve on the forearm to restore hand movement. And that was something that was really exciting to me because I had used muscle stimulation previously in rehab, and I saw the promise that it held.

Ian Burkhart:

And then when I first came in to try the muscle stimulation system, to make sure that my hand would respond well and my muscles would respond well, all I could think about is, "I want to be able to control this instead of having an engineer or clinician control this." And then that's where they kind of opened up to the BCI side of the project, where it would be implanting one array in my motor cortex to control the device. So I was implanted in April of 2014 and was the first person to use brain computer interface to move my own body, using the muscle stimulation sleeve on my arm. It restored for me pronation and supination in the hand and flexion extension of the wrist, as well as flexion and extension of all five digits of my right arm. I was enrolled in that trial for just over seven and a half years and was explanted just last August of 2021.

Taryn Southern:

Amazing.

Matt Angle:

Something that people ask me a lot, and I have to say, "I have no idea," is the question, "What does it feel like? What is it like when you're learning to use a BCI? What's that process like?" The three of you are part of a very rarefied group of people who can answer that question that I feel like the people listening would really love to understand that experience of kind of, it's almost like telekinesis, moving things with your mind.

Ian Burkhart:

I think Nathan will have a very different answer than Jan and I, since he actually had some sensation back to his brain, but for me, it was restoring that hand and wrist function. And so I was just thinking about moving my hand and wrist, which is a weird thing when someone asks you to start moving your hand, because I don't remember when I thought about it, when I was growing up. As an infant, when you're learning that skill, you don't know what you're doing and then by the time you grow up and you're old enough to understand what you're doing, you don't have to think about it because it's just second nature. So it was pretty challenging because it is kind of abstractive. Am I thinking about this the right way or not, if I'm not getting any feedback?

Ian Burkhart:

But yeah, you had to think about what you're trying to move. And I tried to dial that into what muscles am I trying to activate in my forearm to make my fingers flex and extend, or my wrist and that helped. And we did a lot of just repetition of mirror therapy with using one of the researchers' hands next to mine, moving that. And then also, once we were connected to the brain computer interface and seeing a virtual hand on the screen responding, that gives you that feedback to know if you're thinking about it the right way or not, or at least on the same page.

Matt Angle:

Did it evolve? I try to imagine what it would be like. I'm thinking like when I first learned to drive, I was really concentrating on the steering wheel, but now I don't pay attention to it. Does it evolve? Or do you think about it anymore? Does it become more like second nature?

Jan Scheuermann:

When I first started to try to move the arm, they said, "Think about moving your hand right." And I was trying so hard to move the hand right, I was concentrating and thinking, "Right, right, right, right." And then it was time to move it left, I thought, "Left, left, left." And I wasn't thinking about moving my hand, I was trying to move the whole body. And that was very slow for the first couple days. And as I caught on, it was just like moving my own arm. Then it became much more natural.

Jan Scheuermann:

The way I explained it to someone a couple years later, I said, "Okay, reach your hand up to do a high five." And they did. And I said, "Now what did you think about?" And he said, "Well, not very much." And I said, "That's exactly it. It's natural." And even though I had been a quadriplegic for 12 years and my body had forgotten how to move my arm, my brain had not forgotten. So my brain and memory did what brains are supposed to do and I thought about moving my arm, they said, "Yeah, that's easy. This is how you do it." Then I moved the arm.

Nathan Copeland:

When I first started using the BCI, control of the robotic arm has always just been really intuitive and easy. Basically it worked the first time we tried it and I think about moving my arm around and the robotic arm moves around. I think we've controlled up to like nine degrees of freedom. It is one of those things that sometimes thinking less is more. You don't have to think about every single joint and every single little rotation of your wrists and all that. You just kind of end up thinking about the goal that you're trying to do. And then of course I have the extra answers to how does it feel, because that's a can of worm question since I'm the first person to ever have implants in sensory cortex. So the sensations that stimulation elicit are entirely electrode dependent.

Nathan Copeland:

So there's 60 some electrodes that are in my sensory cortex, that they can stimulate on each one. And basically depending on where exactly they are in the brain, each one will feel like a separate area of my hand, mostly at the base of my fingers or my index knuckle. So they'll stimulate one and it might feel like a pressure and then they can simulate another and it might just feel like a tingle or like a warm tingle or a combination of those kinds of things. And depending on the parameters of the stimulation, like if they adjust frequency and that kind of stuff, it can feel like tapping or vibration and it's really cool. The first time it happened, I had to do a double take and kind of be like, "Okay, do that again." Make sure I wasn't just imagining things or something because those experiments started at really low amplitudes because no one knew what it was going to feel like.

Nathan Copeland:

So safety protocols and all that, they went through to everyone and started really low and I didn't feel anything for a couple weeks and I'd be like, "Turn it up all the way and we'll just start from there." And they were like, "No." "Okay." So then the first thing I felt, it's one of those, just a random tingle that I could have easily just imagined. But knowing that it corresponded to when they just clicked the button that was supposed to send a little shock to my brain, like, "Oh, okay. Yes, that is that." We have our aha moment of science works how science is supposed to work. It was really cool. And then from there we just kept going and I go in three days a week for four hours and I might feel it a couple hundred times, maybe, a session.

Nathan Copeland:

And now it is just second nature and it's not the most natural sensations. They don't have one to one, real life comparisons sometimes. Sometimes they do, but using them in coordination with the robotic control improved my performance and it kind of boiled down to seeing the robotic hand grab something as my only form feedback was okay. It's obviously better than not seeing, but depending on the object, I might not know exactly how well it is making contact. And I might go to pick something up and just immediately drop it or just not have a good grasp. When I got the sensory feedback, the intensity would actually increase depending on how much pressure the object was receiving from the robotic fingers so I could just instantly tell if I had a firm grasp on the object and that just kind of let me move on to the next phase of picking it up and moving it and not spending extra time just trying to think, "Oh, grab it harder," or longer before I would continue interacting with the object.

Matt Angle:

Jan, you flew a flight simulator with your brain.

Jan Scheuermann:

Yeah.

Matt Angle:

I am really curious, when you're flying a plane with your brain, are you thinking the same kinds of things you're thinking to feed yourself chocolate? Or did you have to switch mindsets? How did that work?

Jan Scheuermann:

Well, they said, "To make the plane turn right, think that you're turning your wrist this way and turning your wrist that way to make the plane turn left." So it was very quick to pick up. But yes, exactly. It was very quick to pick up those signals and it became very natural very quickly and they started me off in the clouds. And after I had the hand signals down, which took about 60 seconds, I was out of my chair. I was out of my broken body. I was flying. I was in the clouds and it was so exciting. I remember like it was yesterday, the goosebumps and the chills and just gasping in awe because I was flying. And I started out with my point of view being that I was behind the plane, flying it. Then I switched to cockpit view, which was much cooler. Man, the whole time I did that flight simulation experiment, you couldn't wipe the smile off of my face. I was high from it.

Ian Burkhart:

We did a similar experiment where I was controlling a car simulator. It was very similar, Jan, as you explained where to turn right or left, you're opening your hand or closing your hand, pronation, supination. And then for me, accelerate was hand open and break or decelerate was hand close. And we did the same thing where we were starting in that third person view and it was nice to drive the car and whatnot, but getting in kind of that cockpit view was really, really fun because it was really similar to when I'm driving my own car. But I had less to think about, because I was just thinking about moving my hand, one of my hands in only a few directions. It really was that sense of freedom and independence.

Taryn Southern:

I'd love to ask a followup question to Nathan about the touch sensation. I don't think we've ever talked about this, Nathan, but when you said that not all the sensations are one to one to real life experiences, but some of them might be, what is the variation of sensation that you might experience? If we were to categorize like vibration, touch like a feather, electrifying sensation, where does it usually fall?

Nathan Copeland:

I mean, the things that have the closest match to sensations that I would've felt when I had intact sensation on my hand are the vibrations. There's some that are tapping and some of the tapping ones have been so intense that I would just sit there and look at my hand to be like, "Is it really like...?" Because if it was thumping visibly, I would be like, "Oh, that doesn't surprise me. It feels like I'm being tapped or poked on." I was just like, "I wonder if my muscle was spasming at the same time or something?" It was just weird having that one that felt so like it could have actually been happening. So those are kind the ones that are the most similar, but probably the most of the sensations I feel just fall into this kind of pressure tingle kind of area.

Nathan Copeland:

And I get asked at least once a month to do a 60 microamps survey where they just stimulate every electrode at 60 microamps. And I just fill out a form, it's on a surface of like what the sensation felt like and how natural it was and the different... There's a slider so I can put how much pressure. But most of them just fall into some range of pressure and tingle. And sometimes they're just pressure or tingle and sometimes it's a combination.

Matt Angle:

Is it pretty stable or is it like you go in one day and electrode 11 did nothing the day before, and then as you come in, it's like, "Holy crap, that's new?"

Nathan Copeland:

It's really funny that you picked out 11 because over the years, some things have changed and the electrode we used to use for lots of things just over and over was electrode 11. And it felt like the base of my index finger and it was just the go-to electrode. And then over time, they kind of didn't respond the same way. And now we use electrode 19 and that's been stable for years and over the long term, there have been some changes, but for the most part, I think it's been stable.

Matt Angle:

Ian, you've had a really interesting experience with neuroplasticity. Can you tell us a little bit about how things changed as you were going through this functional electrical stimulation trial?

Ian Burkhart:

Certainly. And it touches a little bit on earlier what you were saying as far as how does it change what you're thinking about? I remember the first few probably weeks to maybe a month of sessions, going in and just trying to think about only moving my hand and fingers. And that's the only thing I would focus on and everything else would need to be pretty quiet in the room and whatnot. When we were doing experiments and I would leave the sessions just feeling completely mentally fatigued, and it got easier and easier as we started to incorporate some of the feedback to me as well as myself just learning what to think about to move my hand. And I think one of the interesting aspects of my study was that it was focusing on restoring my own arm movement.

Ian Burkhart:

It allowed me to combine the movement in my shoulder and bicep that I do have still preserved from my spinal cord injury, with the movement that the simulation sleeve and the BCI gave me of my hand and wrist. And that really allowed for a lot of things that we could do because it acted as intense occupational therapy every time I was in a session. And some of that then did translate to me when I was home and not connected to the system of things that I learned, how to just pronate and supinate my forearm so I can pick up objects a little bit better now than I was able to before.

Taryn Southern:

Curious for all of you, how this research changed or didn't change the way that you think about your own mind and your brain? I mean, the fact that, Nathan, that you were able to have these sensations restored seemingly out of nowhere. I mean, it does kind of feel like this untangible, meta-awareness of the inner workings of your mind. So I'm just curious if any of you had any big take home insights from the work that you did about how you think about thinking.

Jan Scheuermann:

I did in that I have a little saying on my desk, it says, "You are more than the body you live in." And I've always believed that in my mind but it was really brought home by this experiment. And I have a dictation program. Then before my illness, I wrote and produced murder mystery parties. So I used my dictation program to then write, and I wrote a book that I posted on Kindle called Sharp as a Cucumber. And I've been writing ever since then, and I've joined a writer's group and it wouldn't have happened I think if I hadn't been part of this study, which made me think, "Oh yeah, your life doesn't stop. Your brain's still working. They have the technology that you can write now on the computer. So do that. Go for it then." I'm still writing and still grateful to program for that.

Nathan Copeland:

I don't think I've really changed how I think about my thinking. It's like I recognize that there are implants in my brain and unless I'm at the lab and actively using BCI, I don't think about them. I know they're there, but I really don't have any reason to think about them. Because even when I'm using them, it's just that intuitive. I'm thinking about moving my own arm and I'm not thinking about, "Okay, activate this area of my brain," and then the electrodes will pick it up and it'll go through the computer and all that. It's just I think about moving and it moves. So I've never really had any big meta-awareness of it. I mean, sometimes I've-

Taryn Southern:

They haven't stimulated your spiritual revelation.

Nathan Copeland:

No, no. My third eye is still closed and they haven't found that electrode or whatever, but yeah, sometimes I'll look at things, I guess, differently, or in a way no one else ever thinks about it. I'll think about a video game that I want to play. And I'll kind of be like, "Okay, I could kind of play it with moving my arm this way for directions," but maybe there's like two buttons you need, or three buttons you need. And I'm like, "I don't think I could tell the computer to push the button." When I'm thinking about pronating or supinating, could I really do that at the times I would need to while also thinking about these other movements? And sometimes it would be too much mental gymnastics, I think, but also I think maybe if I did it for a long time, maybe I could train to kind of think that way.

Taryn Southern:

One of the things I wanted to ask all three of you about, I wanted to better understand the cognitive burden of using the BCI. Is it something that when you are in the lab, that when you walk out of the lab, you just feel so much more exhausted as a result of that level of concentration, or how would you describe that?

Ian Burkhart:

For me, it started pretty heavy early on as a lot of intense concentration on using the device. But after, I'd say, six months of going into sessions, unless something new was thrown at me, it was just like riding a bike again, because I had all that practice and I was just doing it. I wasn't needing to concentrate as hard. It was much more second nature. And I made sure that I kind of compartmentalized myself of when I was using the system in the lab to when I was home and I couldn't use the system because it was my own hand that I was controlling. So that way I wouldn't get upset that, "Oh, now I'm home. And I can't use my hand like I just was while I was in the lab." But it was really an awesome experience to be able to have the system work well enough that I didn't have to really think about it that hard. And it was just like using my hand prior to my spinal cord injury.

Matt Angle:

Jan, what was your experience like?

Jan Scheuermann:

My experience-

Taryn Southern:

Was it exhausting working in the lab, the amount of energy that it took?

Jan Scheuermann:

Now, actually when I left the lab, I always felt energized because I was enjoying what I was doing so much that I would get home and have all this mental energy. And that's where it helped to be able to start writing again, because I'd have a lot of energy for it. It obviously wasn't physically taxing. I mean, the only thing I did physical was driving my wheelchair with my chin up and down the hill, then getting in and out of the van. No, I was always energized by it.

Nathan Copeland:

And I've never been, I guess, physically fatigued using the BCI. Like I've said, the control was really intuitive, but that's not to say I haven't been fatigued during testing at the lab sometimes, especially a sensory only task where I'm getting a bunch of stimulations all in a row and I'm just saying which one was more intense or which one was more similar to this or that. And they can go on for a long time. I can just kind of easily lose some of my attention sometimes. So we started recently taking more breaks and doing like Washington Post crossword puzzles, keeping my mind more active during some of these tasks that are really just repetitive and simple to the point where I can kind of autopilot them when I should pay more attention sometimes.

Ian Burkhart:

I'm right there with you. There are certainly a few of the more boring experiments that we did that were on the edge of putting me to sleep.

Taryn Southern:

Gosh, I mean the three of you have all done a lot of really interesting things. One that Jan and Nathan have in common is the creation of art. You both used your interface for that. Let's hear more about that experience. Jan, we'll start with you because I think you were the first to create art with Hector, right?

Jan Scheuermann:

Okay, if you want to call it art. The program I used, I would move Hector. Hector is the name I gave my robotic arm, okay? So I'd move my robotic arm in space and that would move a pointer on the screen to make an image. But the image disappeared after maybe 60 seconds. So what I did one time was I drew the outline of a hand and by the time I got to the pinky finger, was finishing it, the very beginning started to disappear. So we were able to get a screenshot of the whole hand. So I called that Hector's first self-portrait.

Matt Angle:

Oh, if only NFTs had been around at that time, you definitely could have-

Jan Scheuermann:

Well, yeah, I didn't do a lot, nothing I would certainly call art. I mean, scribbles. One day, they taped a marker onto Hector and I was supposed to try drawing on an erase board that they held up. It was hard to keep the marker pressed against the erase board. Now Andy Schwartz was our lead guy, the scientist who started all this, doing the implants in monkeys 20, 30 years ago. So after he left the office, they held the board up in front of me. They move the board to write the letters Andy on it. And when the Andy-

Matt Angle:

Oh, that's cool.

Jan Scheuermann:

Yeah. When Andy came in the next day, said, "Look what I did." And his eyes got big, "Really? You did that yesterday?" We all first burst out laughing, told him how we cheated the system. But yeah, nothing like what Nathan does.

Taryn Southern:

I think that's a good segue, Nathan.

Matt Angle:

Yeah.

Taryn Southern:

Let's hear about all that's going on and it's a very active world for Nathan.

Nathan Copeland:

Jan is wrong in one way is you can call squiggles art because I have some NFT squiggles up and hopefully someone will buy them. But yeah, so one of the big experiments we started doing maybe two years in was cursor control on the computer. One of the first ways that we started really assessing my control would be to use a paint program. I would just have like up, down, left, right, and a click. So I would think about pinching my index, middle, and thumb together and that would kind of be my click. All my first things I drew were squiggles and I started using a different program and using the shapes and stuff. So I started drawing like a turkey and a snowman and some stuff like that. And it was a good way to assess control because I could start doing something and they would be able to tell what I was intending to do without me having to actually say, "I'm going to draw this."

Nathan Copeland:

And so then you can go, "Okay, this is working as intended. Well, he's not accidentally drawing a turkey." So I did stuff like that. And then March 2020, a week after the world shut down and I wasn't going into the lab for testing anymore, they had arranged for me to take home a portable system that I could use at home and it's not as powerful as the lab set up. So basically the cursor is all I can do. That let me play video games with a keyboard emulator and draw.

Nathan Copeland:

And one of the things I ended up drawing was the cat. BCI Cat-01-the Calico is what I named the NFT that I put up at the end of the summer and it sat there for eight months until someone finally paid what was the equivalent of 11 grand at the time on OpenSea. And it's one of those things where I've always enjoyed drawing with the BCI and it's just something fun to do. I can do a doodle or I can try something more complex. And I'd always dreamed big. When I first started drawing like turkeys and stuff, I was like, "Oh, there's lots of art museums here in Pittsburgh. Maybe one will pay a million dollars for one of these or something. I'll change my life."

Matt Angle:

You know, I've seen some stuff at the Warhol Museum that was substantially less interesting than your artwork.

Taryn Southern:

I would agree, Nathan.

Nathan Copeland:

It's just you got to know the right people or something. I don't know.

Taryn Southern:

You have a pretty substantial collection though now. I mean, how many pieces have you made?

Nathan Copeland:

Pieces? Probably at least 20. I don't have them all up as NFTs, but I did sell that first one and I thought, "Okay, maybe people do find value in this stuff, besides me just having some fun." So I've sold a few more and I got invited to be on SuperRare. And so maybe that'll hopefully get me some more exposure and I have drawn some more complex things. And I actually am almost done with drawing this eyeball, coloring it in because I liked the pun of BCIS so I think I'm going to do a series of eyes.

Matt Angle:

If someone wanted to buy your artwork or wanted to commission you, how would they get in touch with you? Because there might be someone here who's like, "Holy shit. I want to have a BCI artwork."

Nathan Copeland:

I'm on OpenSea, SuperRare, Twitter, email. It's all BCIcanDoBetter. The email's at Gmail. LinkedIn, I actually just posted on LinkedIn the other day of, "I'd really love to live in a place like this," and it was a Zillow listing to a condo that's in Pittsburgh that is amazing. I just randomly looked it up. I was like, "I wonder if I could buy a house and kind of live in a better situation than I am right now." And I was like, "What's the coolest place in Pittsburgh?" But I posted on LinkedIn. I was saying, "Does anyone want to work out an unconventional deal where we have a contract where I make X amount of commissioned pieces and I get X property to live at." So nothing has come about. But yeah, so I haven't done any commissions yet, but I am open to it. I'm also on Instagram and I got a message from music producer guy on Instagram. He was like, "I want to work with you." And I said, "This is what I'm doing right now." And so now once I finally finished my first BCI, it has a song to go with it-

Taryn Southern:

That's amazing.

Nathan Copeland:

Multi-platinum guy and-

Taryn Southern:

Wow.

Nathan Copeland:

Worked with a lot of artists and it was kind of funny because when I replied to him, I said, "Oh, this is the image that I'm working on now." He said, "Oh, I think I can think of something with that." And he kept messaging me like every 30 minutes, he's like, "Oh I've got a melody down. And I figured this part out." And he made a post of him working at his studio and it had like 53,000 views already after like a couple hours. And so I was like, "This is cool." So open for more collabs.

Taryn Southern:

Is the vision to take the music and pair it with the artwork? Or it will be like a moving image that shows you making it? How are you going to be releasing that?

Nathan Copeland:

It'll play with the artwork. So it'll be a little video, I guess.

Taryn Southern:

That's amazing. And when can we expect to see that?

Nathan Copeland:

I don't know, life is not full of enough hours. There's a million things that have kept me from just putting the last couple hours into this thing. Because I go to testing and two weeks ago I had COVID and there's always something that I'm either not around or I'm doing something or it's my day off, but I'm just too tired to work on it. So hopefully within the next week or two, I will be able to finish it.

Matt Angle:

Speaking of high profile, you're the only person I know that's fist bumped Barack Obama.

Nathan Copeland:

That was the coolest thing I had ever done with the BCI, for a few years until I finally got to go to Japan and speak at some conferences. So Japan kind of bumped that down just a little bit because that was my life's dream. But yeah, handshake and fist bump with Obama was definitely the second coolest thing I've ever done with the BCI.

Jan Scheuermann:

Yeah. I was a bit envious of that. Although, I met Scott Pelley, I was on 60 Minutes so that got a lot of fame. I had my 15 minutes where I was being called by every scientific journal and asked for interviews left and right. So that was cool. And I very much enjoy public speaking about this. I have a whole slide presentation and pictures from the experiment and I talk about it. I've spoken to groups of a couple hundred people about this and very much enjoying them, got a real good reaction.

Taryn Southern:

All of you do public speaking.

Ian Burkhart:

I think it's really important that we all share our experiences because there's just a few of us. And that's why I'm glad that we're able to do something like this. Nathan and I and a couple other individuals did a panel at the Society for Neuroscience's Annual Meeting a few years back. But I think that's part of the responsibility that you have if you're in one of these research studies is to really help the field grow because we see the potential firsthand and the only way it's going to get out to more people and become something that you can just go to your doctor and say, "Hey, I want a BCI." It's going to take more people hearing about it, more people talking about it. And I think that's already pretty evident just in the last few years, how much investment we've seen in the space and how kind of crazy it's getting. And it's exciting to see where we'll be in seven more years.

Matt Angle:

Ian, you've also been quite busy with your foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been doing?

Ian Burkhart:

Certainly. I noticed early on in my spinal cord injury that I was very lucky in the sense that I had my injury one year out of high school. So I still had pretty good ties to the community and that helped the community rally around me when I had my injury in addition to still being on my parents' health insurance and having support from my parents as well, that I was in a better off position than many other people who have spinal cord injuries. And so after we made a lot of headlines with the BCI trial that I was involved in, I had an individual contact me saying that the story really struck a chord with him and he was just asking how to help.

Ian Burkhart:

And I told him that I wanted to start a nonprofit for other individuals with spinal cord injuries. And so he used some of his resources to help me get that off the ground. And since we have raised over $150,000 to help individuals with items like shower chairs or ramps for their house, exercise equipment, all varying types of things that aren't usually covered by insurance, but really help improve the independence of individuals with spinal cord injuries. And so that's been something really exciting for me to work on as a way to kind of give back and keep involved with the spinal cord injury community.

Taryn Southern:

Thanks everyone so much for listening. Reminder that we have an episode two where we will dive into everyone's personal journey as a trial participant and their hopes for the future of BCI tech, as well as some questions and answers from past podcast participants. All of you can also follow, subscribe, check out the show notes for more details. See you for episode two.

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