If you do have some equipment, like
a swimsuit or an artificial foot, then
they’re just accessories to your suc-
cess or failure. But what about these
examples: was it nerves or a tech is-
sue that stopped our Cybathlete? Are
the manufacturers of the Olympic
athlete’s leg more or less responsible
than the manufacturers of the Cy-
bathlete’s arm? It’s easy to say less,
since the leg doesn’t really do anything
aside from exist, while the arm must
do some things all in its own — but I
would disagree. If a special leg makes
you two percent faster than you were,
and you now move those 0.008 sec-
onds into first place, does the credit
really lie entirely on your shoulders?
The standard Olympics attempts to
deal with this tension by regulations:
they prescribe what can and cannot be
done in training as well as in competi-
tion. No steroids, no fancy swimsuits,
nothing that can detract from the core
premise of the Olympic games that
the world comes together to celebrate
the limits of human achievement.
The Cybathlon, in contrast, deals with
this assumption head-on. Instead of
attempting to control what sorts of
technology are allowed, it actually
limits the capabilities of the pilots. For
each of the races, pilots were only eli-
gible if they met certain criteria for dis-
ability–in a sense forcing the human
achievement and the technological
achievement to more equal grounds.
Best of all, both were equally celebrat-
ed. The spectators applauded not only
the pilots for winning the races but
also the companies and research labs
Researchers at the Simon Fraser University
are working on the world’s most advanced
prosthetic (‘bionic’) hand. Source: Simon
Fraser University - University Communica-
tions (Flickr.com)
that provided the technology to do so.
The atmosphere was one of celebra-
tion, for human and machine both — a
point especially crucial in this domain.
With healthy humans it’s easy enough
to pretend that the human achieve-
ment is the most crucial kind, but
the fact remains that less abled indi-
viduals simply cannot do some things.
Without a hand, you can’t screw in a
light bulb; without being able to con-
trol your muscles, you can’t commu-
nicate with the world. In these cases
it is crucial to see how technology
can come to a person’s aid, and how
the tech itself needs to be celebrated
and supported. BCIs may still not be
something a healthy person would
want for themselves, but as the Cy-
bathlon proved there are many people
for whom such a device makes the
difference between connection within
the world and isolation. Remember-
ing and celebrating the difference that
technology makes, and how devices
and people together can accomplish
so much more than either apart, can
make all the difference in the world.
Vinay Jayaram is a PhD
candidate in brain-computer
interfaces at the Max Planck
Institute for Intelligent Systems
in Tübingen.
Science Snapshot
For my master’s thesis, I conducted a neurofeedback study on
patients with social phobia. Neurofeedback is a neurobiological
technique that teaches individuals to modulate their neural ac-
tivity voluntarily. We used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to
visualize the neural signal of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(dlPFC). The dysfunction of the dlPFC in social anxiety is believed
to result in a biased processing of threat stimuli. The aim of this
study was to minimize attention biases towards threat cues by
training the up-regulation of the dlPFC. Furthermore, we were
interested in potential effects the dlPFC feedback training could
have on patients’ symptomatology. During this project, I became
intrigued not only by the potential of neurofeedback as a novel
therapeutic approach, but also by the method of NIRS and some
of its methodological advantages over other neurophysiologi-
cal methods. I am currently very enthusiastic about starting my
PhD project, in which NIRS-neurofeedback will be used to train
socio-emotional abilities in patients suffering from schizophre-
nia.
Ann-Christin Kimmig graduated from the Neural and Behavioral Sciences master’s program
in 2016. She is currently a GTC doctoral student at the Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
in the Innovative Neuroimaging Group of Prof. Birgit Derntl.
May 2017 | NEUROMAG |
9