“The brain has to talk to the spinal cord in order to make any kind of movement,” says Jack Martin, medical professor at the CUNY School of Medicine at The City College of New York, “so after a spinal-cord injury, those connections become impaired. That results in a reduced ability to make the...

“I personally am very excited about this idea of brain decoding, this idea that we can measure brain activity and figure out where your thoughts are,” says Lucas Parra, professor of biomedical engineering at CCNY. “I work in the lab with electroencephalography. It records electric brain signals …...