A Brazilian-born physician and neuroscientist has a goal: A young quadriplegic, suited up in a "prosthetic exoskeleton," will deliver the first kick at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. It's a long shot or, as Dr. Miguel Nicolelis calls it, a "Brazilian moon shot."

But Nicolelis and his international team of researchers are one major step closer to making it happen, according to the results of their experiment, published in Nature on Wednesday.

The researchers hooked up a pair of female rhesus monkeys, named Mango and Nectarine, with electrodes implanted directly into two areas of the brain that control voluntary movement and process sensory input from the body's cells. The monkeys then learned to use their brains to move a virtual hand - the electrodes on the motor cortex read their intentions to move, and the "hand" responded.

As the monkeys, using their "hands," touched virtual objects with different textures, tactile sensory information was sent back to the brain. Although the monkeys obviously can't tell anyone what the virtual objects felt like to them, they were able to complete tasks dependent on the tactile sensory information and earn a reward, meaning that the objects, at least, felt different from each other.

That sensory feedback to the brain, as simple as it was in this experiment, is crucial to Nicolelis and his team's goal. Previous attempts to create a "brain-machine interface" as it's called, have relied on visual feedback – for quadriplegics, this feedback is the primary way by which they perceive the world around them. But for the complex task of walking, the brain needs better information. As Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a neuroscientist not involved in the project, explained to Nature: "If you want to reach and grasp a glass, visual feedback won't help you. … It's the sensory feedback that tells you if you have a good grip or if you are about to drop it."

The research team still has a long way to go. The Walk Again Project, a larger project Nicolelis collaborates with, wants to achieve nothing short of building what amounts to a new body for those who have lost mobility below the neck. But the brain will need more complex, complete sensory information in order to perform many of the actions those of us who are fully mobile take for granted. As Kip Ludwig, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke's program on brain repair and plasticity, told the Los Angeles Times:

"Ideally, the long-term goal would be a prosthetic that would send all the sensory information — touch, position, temperature — to the arm that goes into, say, drinking a cup of coffee...[this experiment] is an important step, but there's a lot of work yet to be done."

As published online at Slate.com, 6 October 2011