There's no doubt that the motor cortex is involved.

There's also no doubt that it's not able to control your movements on its own.

And how those things come together is, in some sense, the heart of free will. My area of expertise with functional neurosurgery allows this unique window where we can now research the intricacies of hand and arm function so that ultimately we could drive computer interfaces that would help patients with paralysis. I had a profound experience while I was growing up.

A friend of mine was paralyzed from a diving accident.

And so I've always been thinking about this idea of restoring function with devices to give patients some independence back. Patients that we're recruiting for this research are undergoing deep brain stimulation for movement disorders.

They have Parkinson's disease or tremor.

We place a long-term electrode deep into the brain for their movement disorder that they're going to have as their therapy moving forward.

And just before we wake them up, we place this electrode on the surface of the brain.

It's about 2 centimeters by 2 centimeters.

And then we're going to start the experiment.

And it has 1,024 contacts.

It's hundreds of times higher resolution than the next most readily available electrodes. Is precision ready?

And it provides the world's highest resolution electrical picture of her motor cortex as she moves.

So we can see a very, very high-resolution window into the brain.

And we've created special gloves that reconstruct the movements of the hand.

And so in the OR, what we see is this full 3D reconstruction of their actual movement synchronized with the deep activity in the brain and the cortical surface activity.

All are a window into how the behavior is being executed. So I'm going to ask you to reach out to this 3 times.

Each person is different from every other person.

And until we study more people, we just don't know what that range of variation is going to be. What is a frequency band?

When you think about moving the hand or actually go to move the hand, different frequency bands carry different types of information related to movement.

What we get is these really interesting time waveform.

You can see how the activity on the brain surface evolves over time.

So it's sort of like a musical orchestra where certain frequencies go away, certain frequencies come up.

We see interesting patterns of spirals and waves traveling from one direction to the other.

One of my colleagues likened it to watching the weather on television.

So really our job is to listen and know what patterns in the music relate to the behavior. When we are successful in deploying these kinds of technologies, what it will demonstrate is that we understand the brain and its inner workings.

And that's going to have foundational impact on who we think we are and how we explain our behavior.

The technology that we're working on to provide thought-based control of external devices to people who are paralyzed, that has never been possible before.

That's only been really dreamed of.

And so I imagine a world where folks with paralysis will be able to interact with things in their home.

I imagine a world where we can take somebody who's an amputee and restore the movement with a prosthetic.

But it's incredible that we're now at this cusp of new technologies that are going to facilitate us understanding how the brain works and potentially translating that to our patients.