I'v heard of some of this before, but sounds like they're making advances pretty quickly. http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060327/sc_space/braincellsfusedwithcomputerchip
I saw some dude on TV the other day who was paralyzed. He had a chip attached to his brain and he was controlling a cursor on a computer monitor just by thought. He was able to do stuff like move the cursor and select something. It was really cool. They were in the infancy stages of building a link between brain thoughts and devices to allow paralyzed people to accomplish tasks where the goal is to let the brain send signals to devices for functions like walking and using arms, etc. . They even had him hooked up to a prosthetic limb and he could make the hand squeeze just by thinking the thought.