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Scott Frey grew up watching multiple sclerosis slowly ravage his mother’s body.

Frey recalls the muscle weakness, the spasticity, and lack of balance that stripped his beloved parent of her independence, but mostly he remembers the loss of hand function that rendered even the simplest tasks next to impossible.

“...one of the things she struggled most with as that disease progressed was the use of her hands,” Frey, Miller Family Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Missouri, recounted in an early January podcast. “I remember as a child being very aware of just how important it is to have good hand function in order to live independently and to do all those things that when we’re healthy, we really take for granted—dressing, caring for the house, and taking care of business; most of those activities to some degree involve our hands. I was, in essence, my mom’s hands from the time I was really little and I think that planted the seed in me...”

That seed eventually fostered Frey’s interest in brain-hand communication and the complex neural networks inv