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this has been going on for a while

discover magazine 1999
A team of neurologists has developed a device that allows paralyzed people to communicate through a computer without having to move a muscle. Philip Kennedy, a neurologist in private practice near Atlanta, has been working on the implant--a millimeter-long electrode--for 12 years. Implanted into the part of the brain that normally controls the hands, the electrode, coated with growth factors that spur brain tissue to grow into it, picks up electric signals sent back and forth by nerve cells. When a patient thinks about moving his hands, electrical activity near the electrode increases. Through an amplifier and antennas positioned underneath the scalp, those signals are transmitted to a computer, which uses them to drive a cursor across a screen. By concentrating or relaxing, a patient can control the firing of his neurons and make the cursor stop on an icon with a prepared message or on a letter of a keyboard display. The computer then speaks or prints a letter or message.

Kennedy and his partner Roy Bakay, a neurosurgeon at Emory University have tried the implant in two patients so far. The first, a woman suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, passed away due to her illness 76 days after receiving the implant. Their second patient, a man paralyzed from the top of the neck down after a stroke, has had his implant for nearly a year. He hasn't quite mastered the keyboard, but he can position the icon near prepared messages. "He's delighted," says Kennedy, "and when it works for him he has a big smile on his face."

Kennedy and Bakay hope their implant will help people control prosthetic devices as well as computer cursors. There are approximately 5 million people in the world who are quadriplegic, paraplegic, or have locked-in syndrome. With enough funding, says Kennedy, he could help these people in as little as three to five years.

emory univ.
"In 2004 a young quadriplegic man had his brain plugged into a computer using BrainGate, a brain-machine interface made by a company called Cyberkinetics. With BrainGate he can move a robotic arm, move a cursor on a screen, even beat people at Pong, just by using his brain. So far, the information only flows one way, but what about uploading information to the brain? Deep brain stimulation is already being used to treat Parkinson’s disease, but what about certain dementias, such as Alzheimer’s disease? Could we augment memory by stimulating certain areas of the brain? If so, could we increase the memory of normal individuals, or should we?"

Technologies of this kind are often incorrectly seen in isolation. That is, typically, people just limit what someone might do with invention to just it, in the absence of other inventions.

But in truth, an invention like this would be a good *complement* to other inventions. For example, speech-to-text software like Dragon Naturally Speaking is already in its fifth or sixth generation and works very well for some things.

But while it is an efficient way to write words, navigation with Dragon is more difficult than if you could just move a mouse pointer around with your mind.

It might increase the efficiency of what you were doing by several times.