Elisa Kallioniemi slides a circular disk over her head, stops above her right ear and clicks. Her left hand jumps. She moves it a couple of inches back, clicks again, and is suddenly speechless, mid-sentence. With a single pulse of electromagnetic energy, her device can activate or inhibit the brain’s major command centers.
What she is now trying to determine is whether multiple pulses in the motor cortex can produce longer-term therapeutic results by retraining neural circuits. Her first focus is people who have lost some control of their limbs following a stroke.