In July 2006, after suffering from epilepsy for more than 30 years, 41-year-old Sonya Hearn arrived at an unusually comfortable corner room on the eighth floor of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. During her 20-day stay there, she had several epileptic seizures while doctors recorded the electrical activity of her brain through electrodes leading out of an 8-centimeter hole in her head.Such observation is standard for epilepsy patients, because it allows doctors to pinpoint the part of a patient’s brain where the seizures originate. But the data that neurologists gleaned from Hearn’s brain was anything but standard. While at Columbia, Hearn was the first to have a new kind of brain-wave recording device implanted, a device that neurologists hope will lead to a way to predict seizures—and someday, a way to prevent them.Read more at...IEEE Spectrum, June 2009.