Dr. Michael Kilgard

I've got to make big changes.

But I wasn't expecting this because in evolution, if you get a hole in your head, you just die.

There's no ICU.

No one is coming to save you.

You just die.

And so we never had the chance to practice getting good at recovering.

We now know we could make better gains.

And the paper you mentioned in Nature, same thing happened with spinal cord injuries.

People have had years ago spinal cord injuries.

They just – they could barely move it.

We only picked people who have some movement.

If there's no movement, we have nothing to reward, nothing to condition, nothing to strengthen.

So we chose people who had incomplete injuries.

I mean they still have some function, but they're obviously impaired.

Then we repeatedly paired with the physical therapists.

They're the real experts.

They said this is the right muscle you should be practicing with.

There's different muscles in your hand that do different things.

They measure what you can't do.

But you can kind of do it, and we practiced that.