The goal is to test whether the chip can give people who are paralyzed the ability to use their mind to control electronic devices.

A brain losing connections is a brain in distress, and inflammation abounds. “There's inflammation in the brain with virtually every acute or long-term neurodegenerative disorder,” says Greig.

Brain diseases such as Alzheimer's 1 or Parkinson's 2 and injury such as stroke 3 have been considered to result in permanent loss of neurons with no possibility of cellular regeneration. This ...