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Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prosthetic Limbs
himicos was one of many readers to point out one recent success of scientists working to develop working brain-machine interfaces, writing "A team at the university of Pittsburgh has finally advanced a 2002 technology enough for use in prosthetic limbs, the targeted application all along. Training computer models to the firing patterns of the neurons in the parts of the brain that control motion, they are able to project the intentions of a monkey to a robotic arm, which follows the will of the animal.
The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored." Reader phpmysqldev adds a link to coverage at the BBC, and writes "This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities." (Note that this research has been going on for quite some time.)
Shannon entropy has been a standard tool in data communications for a very long time--telcos use this math to make your phones work. It's effectively a way of quantifying the informational content of a signal, which can be used to determine exactly what kind of bandwidth you need in a bandwidth-limited environment. I'm uncertain what it's used for in the context of a brain-machine interface.
Any good data communications textbook would have some nice examples in it, and actually that wikipedia article posted is very readable and informative.