Can a monkey learn to control a single neuron in its motor cortex independently of the muscles it normally drives? Eberhard Fetz traces five decades of work on volitional neural control from biofeedback to brain-computer interfaces.

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Eberhard Fetz recounts the intellectual journey from his pioneering 1969 experiments on operant conditioning of single motor cortex neurons to the development of the Neurochip, an autonomous neural interface that creates artificial connections between brain sites, spinal cord, and muscles. His early work demonstrated that monkeys could learn to volitionally increase or decrease the firing rate of individual neurons to earn rewards, with the key insight that the animal was not simply conditioning a neuron in isolation but learning to con ...