Briefing Chat: Testosterone and sperm may get a boost from obesity drugs

**Nick Petruchow** (0:04)
Hello, and welcome to the Briefing Chat Podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories that have been highlighted in The Nature Briefing. I'm Nick Petruchow, and joining me this week is Shamini Bundell. Shamini, what have you got for me this time?

**Shamini Bundell** (0:18)
Oh, I've got some good news science.

**Nick Petruchow** (0:21)
Yay, I love good news.

**Shamini Bundell** (0:22)
For a change. Yeah, this is a topic that we've covered for many years on The Nature Podcast, on video, and it's about brain computer interfaces.

**Nick Petruchow** (0:32)
Right.

**Shamini Bundell** (0:33)
So this is just this really cool concept that you can read minds, you can translate patterns of firing of neurons in the brain into something, well, they're electrical signals. You can then read them with a computer and translate them into, well, in this case, mostly typing, but things like movement and things like this. And the reason this is a sort of really nice good news story is this is an example of a participant who's been using a brain computer interface at home for the last two years, very successfully. So this isn't just occasionally as part of a study, this is integrated into this person's everyday life and massively improved their life. And this was reported in a paper in Nature Medicine, and I've been reading about it in a Nature article.

**Nick Petruchow** (1:24)
So normally, as you say, it's the case that people are doing this for a short term thing, maybe for an experiment or something like that to see how it works. But this person has been using it for a long time. And what sort of kind of brain computer interface is this? Is it speaking for them, typing? What is it doing? What is it translating, I guess, to make into something that can be understood by others?

**Shamini Bundell** (1:45)
Well, enough different things that this person, Casey Harrell, can continue in their job. They can operate a computer, send text messages, e-mails. He has a job in climate advocacy.
And so he has myotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is a type of motor neuron disease. He was diagnosed with that six years ago.
And this brain computer interface that he has, which is sort of part of a study, but it's full time in his house available to him. And it allows him to communicate with an average speed of 56 words per minute in terms of typing, which is pretty decent. If you get a sense of it, I went and did one of those typing speed tests. And it came out as 70, which is, I think, above what would be generally average if you included young people and old people across the globe. So yeah, 56 words per minute is very decent. And this has really had such a huge impact on this person's life. He describes it as nothing short of revolutionary and says, this has allowed me to keep working and earn money and insurance from my family. This is reconnecting me with friends and family who are too shy or too afraid to come over and not be able to understand me.

**Nick Petruchow** (2:53)
Oh, wow. So certainly a transformative effect on this one particular individual's life. But our research is hoping that something from this could be used to try and do this a bit more widely. Yes.

**Shamini Bundell** (3:04)
As I said, we've been covering these kind of stories for a while and they are moving away from the lab and into being an actually applicable medical device. As I mentioned, a lot of the more advanced devices tend to be used as part of studies where perhaps the participants will go into the lab and use it in specific sessions, or there are some at-home ones but they're not as advanced.
This analysis of two years of use is basically, the co-author says, the most extensive dataset and the longest running speech communication for anyone with this kind of an implant. And another researcher noted this difference that these brain commuter interfaces are now really becoming a medical device instead of a research tool.

**Nick Petruchow** (3:55)
I mean, yeah, I guess communicating with one another is so core to who we are as humans. And hopefully, this will be a boon for people to come. But I wonder, were there any sort of long-term effects? Sometimes these involve probes in the brain and that sort of thing. Was there anything that people have to figure out for the future of this technology?

**Shamini Bundell** (4:12)
Yeah, no, I should say this does, as with all the others at the moment, include microelectrodes being implanted in the brain.