Quadriplegic uses a robot arm controlled by his THOUGHTS

When Erik Sorto was shot in the back 13 years ago, he was left instantly paralysed from the neck down.

But now, in a remarkable breakthrough, the father of two has been able to drink a beer independently for the first time in more than a decade.

The 34-year-old recently brought a bottle of the drink to his lips using a remarkable robotic arm controlled with the power of his thoughts. 

The beer tasted 'like a little piece of heaven,' Sorto said. 

It's the latest attempt at creating mind-controlled prosthetics to help disabled people gain more independence.

In the last decade, several people outfitted with brain implants have used their minds to control a computer cursor or steer prosthetic limbs. 

Previous research targeted a region of the brain known as the motor cortex, which controls movement.

The new work zeroed in on a different area of the brain — the posterior parietal cortex — that's involved in the planning of movements. 

The hope is that this strategy will lead to smoother motions.

It's unclear whether the new approach is better because no side-by-side comparisons have been made yet, but it gives researchers a potential new target in the brain.  

'When you move your arm, you really don't think about which muscles to activate and the details of the movement,' Richard Andersen says Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech said.

'So in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents, by asking the subject to simply imagine the movement as a whole, rather than breaking it down into a myriad components.'

For instance, to drink his beer, Sorto imagined whirling his arms like a windmill.

That mental image triggered activity in several selected brain cells that in turn caused the robotic arm to move.

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