limb pain by showing a patient a reflection of his or her painful body part .
“ It ’ s using mirrors to trick your brain into seeing a new story ,” Lin says . The two of them authored a paper published in the journal Neurocase detailing the effort it took to achieve what Lin calls “ remapping the brain .” But among the most important factors in the process was being surrounded by a wide and accomplished community from UC San Diego . This included the Qualcomm Institute ’ s Rao , who , Lin notes , has studied the science behind cultural traditions of understanding the mind , such as mediation and yoga .
Ultimately , the key to curing this crippling pain , Lin found , “ was something as simple as choosing to let my mind create a new reality .”
With this newfound knowledge and perspective he gained , Lin was ready to embrace his new life — bionic , as he likes to say . He ’ d seen and experienced firsthand the possibilities and potential of the human body and mind . But as so much of his success was due to his unique access to UC San
Diego experts and modern medical care , it made him think about the millions of amputees without such an advantage .
“ I became part of a community that was much larger than I ever knew ,” he says , “ but I was part of a privileged corner of that community . Ninety-five percent of the amputees in the world couldn ’ t do what I was doing because they didn ’ t have access to prosthetics .”
Just as he had used the power of technology to advance the frontiers of exploration , he set his sights on a new horizon .
ONE MORNING LAST MAY , Lin met with about a dozen UC San Diego students working on one of the latest projects of the Center for Human Frontiers ( CHF ), the interdisciplinary research initiative Lin founded to harness technology to augment human potential . The students were sharing their progress with Project Lim ( b ) itless , a technology that could bring affordable , custom-fitting prosthetics to amputees around the world . In a conference room at the Qualcomm Institute where Lin ’ s
PHANTOM MENACE
Racked with phantom limb pain , Lin collaborated with psychology professor V . S . Ramachandran to test new applications of his novel treatment methods . center is based , they discussed the development of a cell phone app that can capture and transport photos of an amputee ’ s residual limb to a 3-D printer , in order to make a custom-fit prosthetic .
“ It didn ’ t seem fair to me that I could walk down a street , or go back to surfing and scuba diving when someone nearly identical to me was begging on the streets just because of a lack of access to a simple piece of technology ,” Lin says . “ Prosthetics are not that complicated ; it ’ s really just a game of trying to figure out how to customize it to your body in a way that allows it to be functional .”
The process behind Project Lim ( b ) itless begins with a cell phone , a few photos and a creative
use of photogrammetry — the same imaging technique Lin used to map ancient sites in Mexico , China and Guatemala . In theory , an amputee could take a series of photos of their residual limb to produce a scan , then electronically deliver
LEGACY OF INSPIRATION
Lin credits his professor Marc Meyers for inspiring his sense of adventure : “ I always thought you had to be an expert in one thing . But he wrote poetry , novels , he went down the Amazon . He did all these other things , but he was also a materials scientist . He was a human being .” Read journal entries from Meyer ’ s expedition down the Amazon at tritonmag . com / amazon
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