Using electrodes planted in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain the two rhesus macaque monkeys learnt to control a cursor on a screen.
The team involved, from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, believe that the technique may be useful to help people paralysed in accidents or by disease.
In the experiments, reported in the online journal PLoS Biology, Miguel Nicolelis and his colleagues said they taught the monkeys to manipulate the cursor using a joystick. When the joystick was taken away, the cursor could be moved if the monkeys made appropriate movements of their arms. Then they realised that the movements were not needed. All they had to do was to think of moving their arms.
Allan Menzies, 22, told the High Court in Edinburgh that he killed Thomas McKendrick in the hope of drinking his blood and becoming immortal after watching a film about vampires more than 100 times.
Sentencing Menzies yesterday, Judge Roderick Macdonald recommended that he serve at least 18 years without parole, branding him “an evil, violent and highly dangerous man who is not fit to be at liberty”.
The judge added: “You engaged in a savage and merciless attack on him involving gratuitous violence of the most horrific nature.” Menzies had shown “no remorse whatsoever” for an abominable crime, he said.
The judge also ordered that Menzies serve three years for attempting to defeat the aims of justice, to run concurrently with his life sentence.
Menzies, of Fauldhouse, West Lothian, was found guilty of murdering Mr McKendrick, a childhood friend, after the Crown rejected his plea to culpable homicide on the ground of diminished responsibility.
The former security guard claimed that he was visited by a female vampire called Akasha, the lead character in the Hollywood blockbuster Queen of the Damned. He said that on her instructions he killed Mr McKendrick, drinking his blood and eating a piece of his skull.
The court was told that after killing his friend at home on December 11, Menzies dumped his corpse in a wheelie bin and later buried him in a shallow grave in nearby woodland.
On being interviewed by police after the discovery of Mr McKendrick’s body, Menzies claimed to have struck a deal with Akasha, who had visited him at home in Fauldhouse. He told the court that he snapped when Mr McKendrick insulted the vampire — played by late American singer Aaliyah — and battered him over the head before stabbing him repeatedly.
Menzies, who had a previous conviction for violence, claimed that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time.
During the trial the court heard evidence from three psychiatric consultants who dismissed such a diagnosis, classing Menzies as a “vivid fantasist” who suffered from an anti-social personality disorder rather than schizophrenia. After his arrest, he was put under observations at Carstairs, a hospital specialising in psychiatric cases.
The jury was told that Menzies, who changed his first name to Leon in honour of the assassin from the eponymous film, had become increasingly obsessed with vampires. When police raided his home in January they found videos, including Queen Of The Damned, and one of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books, Blood And Gold, on which passages had been handwritten.
Pages of the book were shown to the jury, including one on which had been written: “The blood is the life, I have drunk the blood and it shall be mine, for I have seen horror.”
Delivering his judgment, Mr Macdonald hinted at Menzies’s disturbed past, which included detention at a secure unit for a knife attack on a fellow pupil when 14.
The judge said that he would be released only when the parole board decided that his imprisonment was no longer necessary for the protection of the public.
During the trial, Menzies’s family described how in his early teens he became prone to odd behaviour and unpredictable violence.
Menzies’s early childhood was spent living with his alcoholic father and at the homes of other relatives in West Lothian.
His father, Thomas, said that he believed his son had sometimes two personalities — one his real self and the other a character from the horror films that fascinated him.