On June 12th a paralyzed individual connected to a robotic exoskeleton is to open the FIFA World Cup by using his brain activity to kick a soccer ball. What percentage of the signal will originate from the person's brain? We know that speech production or music production (via a piano, for example) occur at about 40 bits/s (Reed & Durlach 1998). What about Pelé playing his favorite game? For sure his performance might have surpassed 40 bits/s but let us fix his rate at forty for the sake of argument. And let us make all bit-rate comparisons against this value to deduce the Pelé Metric for different information transfer scores. What is the Pelé Metric for Miguel Nicolelis’ information transfer scores as published (Tehovnik & Teixeira e Silva 2014; Tehovnik, Woods, Slocum 2013)?:

The bit-rate data are:

Communicating rats one: 0.004 bits/s

Communicating rats two: 0.015 bits/s

BMI monkey one: 0.06 bits/s

BMI monkey two: 0.17 bits/s

BMI monkey three: 0.03 bits/s

When these values are converted into percentage scores using Pele's 40 bits/s information transfer rate as the standard we can now determine the Pelé Metric for each score listed above (e.g. Pelé Metric for communicating rats one = (0.004 bits/s / 40 bits/s) x 100 = 0.01%).

The Pele Metric values for the data are as follows:

Communicating rats: 0.01 & 0.04%

Communicating monkeys: 0.15, 0.43 & 0.08%

Conclusion:

Based on Miguel Nicolelis’ communicating rat and monkey experiments, his paralyzed individual will be transferring less than 1% of the signal while over 99% of the signal will be coming from the robot. As you watch the event on July 12th you will need to ask yourself this: ‘Did the paralyzed individual really kick that ball?’