Book

I'm reading Life lessons: The tiny neuro-gadgets rebuilding our bodies via the New Scientist app https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731640-900-life-lessons-the-tiny-neuro-gadgets-rebuilding-our-bodies/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&%23038;utm_medium=RSS&%23038;campaign_id=RSS%7CNSNS-

REVIEWLife lessons: The tiny neuro-gadgets rebuilding our bodies

Nature's designs are helping to build amazing new devices that link to the body and each other, reveals a fascinating book called Bioinspired Devices

Artificial futures: Many prosthetics are already connected to the brain

Thomas Victor/Agentur Focus/eyevine

THE use of biological forms as inspiration for human constructions has a long history: Velcro (burdock burrs), wind-turbine blades (whale fins) and the arches in Victorian greenhouses (giant water lily leaves) are just a few of the results.

But the modern engineer who bioprospects for solutions often faces broader challenges at tinier scales than ever before. Enter Eugene Goldfield and Bioinspired Devices. The title might be slightly wooden, but the book is fact-packed and beautifully crafted. Goldfield is a developmental psychologist with a long career at Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts. He has also spent a decade working with Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering to improve patients' quality of life by copying nature's neurological assembly and repair processes.

Here, Goldfield's intention is not only to provide a behind-the-scenes view of how biologically inspired devices are researched and applied to medicine, but to update the general reader about neuro-prosthetics research worldwide (from retinal implants to wearable robots and more). In this multidisciplinary field, the latest in mathematical thinking and computer science meets fluid dynamics, neurology, tissue biology, materials science and nanotechnology.

To give us the fullest sense of this ambitious project, Goldfield has split his book in three. General readers really shouldn't skip the introduction, which lays the ground about how nature builds, and how we might do the same.

The second section covers how nervous systems work, what tends to go wrong in humans and how the body regenerates and restructures a system even while it is still operating. This is full of intriguing facts about ants (which measure distance using an in-built pedometer), the secrets of the hypersensitive nasal tentacles of the star-nosed mole, and insights into why dogs are messy drinkers.

The final part concerns the research itself and how top-flight engineers, physiologists and cognitive psychologists, among others, combine insights and expertise to produce small and marvellously elegant machines that either buy time for a neuronal function to regenerate or replace it entirely. This kind of multifaceted technology may be aimed at those who survive car accidents, stabbings and wars, and people with cerebral palsy or who have had strokes.

Unsurprisingly for a developmental psychologist, Goldfield is most fascinated by subtle feedback loops: his work is all about devices that are "smart, safe and which seamlessly integrate with the body and each other". He emphasises the importance of cooperative coordination between the body's various systems in two sections. First, as he considers the creation of neuro-prosthetics that can interpret signals from the brain's central cortex, and then as he explores the various arrangements of actuators, sensors and biomaterials and how they function together as a shared control structure.

Bioinspired Devices provides a fascinating way into one of biomedicine's most complex fields. While Goldfield writes with both erudition and elegance, he has a wonderfully popular touch and a keen sense of humour that has him drawing on Wallace and Gromit and Star Trek (and more) to help with key explanations.

It is a book that will not only leave you with a deep respect for research into copying nature, but also in awe of nature itself and how it does so much with so little. Nice to know we are all cunningly artificed everyday miracles.

Book informationBioinspired Devices: Emulating nature's assembly and repair process by Eugene C. GoldfieldPublished by: Harvard University Press

This article appeared in print under the headline "Natural lessons"

Adrian Barnett

Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus