Paralysed woman uses thoughts to control a fighter jet in a flight simulator

The Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as Darpa, said a paralysed woman involved in one of its experiments had been able to use her thoughts to control a F-35 fighter jet in a flight simulator.

It's just the latest advance for the woman, 55-year-old Jan Scheuermann, who has been the subject of two years of groundbreaking neurosignalling research with Darpa. First, Scheuermann began by controlling a robotic arm and accomplishing tasks such as feeding herself a bar of chocolate and giving high fives and thumbs ups.

Then, researchers learned that Scheuermann was able to control both right-hand and left-hand prosthetic arms with just the left motor cortex, typically responsible for controlling the right-hand side.

After that, Scheuermann decided she was up for a new challenge, according to the Darpa director, Arati Prabhakar.

"Jan decided that she wanted to try flying a Joint Strike Fighter simulator," Prabhakar said, prompting laughter at a recent New America Foundation's Future of War forum. "So Jan got to fly in the simulator." Unlike pilots who use the simulator technology for training, Scheuermann wasn't thinking about controlling the plane with a joystick. She thought about flying the plane itself - and it worked.

"In fact," Prabhakar noted, "for someone who's never flown - she's not a pilot in real life -she's in there flying a simulator directly from neurosignaling."