Space has been described as the final frontier, but a neurosurgeon at the University of Colorado Anschutz dreams of a different horizon that’s much closer to home.
Daniel Kramer, MD, is an associate professor of neurosurgery researching the organ that makes each of us unique – the human brain. Kramer studies how the brain and its cells communicate, produce movement in the body and drive the sensory category of somatosensation, which includes the sensation felt in skin, limbs and joints.
“There’s around 80 billion neurons in the brain,” said Kramer. “Since high school, I’ve thought that the human brain is probably the single most complicated thing nature has ever produced and have had just as many questions about it. There's a million different factors going on all the time just to produce even the most subtle of movements, speech or actions, formed over millions of years of evolution.”
That’s what drives Kramer’s research – an insatiable curiosity in trying to understand something so staggering, sift through the data and ultimately build better treatments for patients who have been told, as Kramer says, “We just don’t know enough yet to treat you.”
What is somatosensation?
The general senses a human experience as touch, derived from receptors in the skin and other organs, is defined as somatosenstion. It includes types of sensations such as pain, temperature, pressure, texture, and proprioception – the body’s ability to sense its position without sight.
The challenge is, of course, navigating this fragile, yet extremely complex, network.
“Our methods of understanding the brain are either non-invasive, which can only impart a granularity of information, only answering some questions, or we can do it invasively,” Kramer said, “But by definition, we're at risk of doing damage to the very area we want to study. And with 80 billion neurons, we also can’t record everything.”
So what has led Kramer and his research team at CU Anschutz to pursue something he admits is a “multidimensional problem with near infinite complexity”?
It starts with uncovering the internal processes that impact cognition and sensory-motor functions, so medicine can develop new treatments for disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and return a sense of touch and movement to paralyzed patients. To do that, Kramer and his colleagues advance two main lines of research:
The former is captured through devices such as Neuropixels probes.
Using a probe that is thinner than a human hair, Neuropixels is an innovative technology that records brain activity at much greater fidelity than previous technologies. “Neuropixels probes let us go from being able to record a single neuron to hundreds of neurons at the same time,” Kramer said.
In April 2026, Kramer and his team, including Daniel Denman, PhD, at CU Anschutz saw the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved use of this technology to study executive function – high-level cognition that allows humans to do planning and abstract thinking – in Parkinson’s disease patients at CU Anschutz.
The goal is to look for disruptions, patterns or other unusual activity in the brain of these patients and target the signals to find better treatments.
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Kramer’s work also draws inspiration from his curiosity about the cascade effect of the brain’s operations.
“In terms of the motor sensory world, it isn’t simply, ‘I want to think about moving here, and then I move here,’” Kramer said. “Think about getting something out of the refrigerator. Initially you might be thinking it’s simply ‘extend arm, pull.’ Just that motor control. Your brain is actually doing countless calculations in the background. You're staring at your fridge, you choose among many options, form your hand and subconsciously move your arm to navigate around these items.”
Kramer foresees a future where paralyzed patients leverage those same signals in parts of the brain to manipulate a robotic arm through brain-computer interfaces.
But the vision for Kramer and the team’s research goes beyond just controlling movement.
“We are also working on restoring somato-sensation,” he said. “We have some patients that we are collaborating with on this research who are paralyzed and can’t feel anything from the neck down. Our larger goal is to give them feeling again in their hand.”
Science always takes a team
Kramer’s work is part of a larger trial with Richard Andersen, PhD, and Charles Liu, PhD, at the University of Southern California and Caltech. At CU Anschutz, Kramer collaborates closely with Luke Bashford, PhD, who also has an appointment at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, and Daniel Denman, PhD. Kramer and the team also work closely with Craig Hospital in Englewood, a leader in neurorehabilitation to treat brain and spinal cord injuries. The BCI is also partly funded by Blackrock Neurotech – where Kramer serves as part of a clinical advisory team.
Kramer acknowledges that none of this work would be possible without the dedicated research collaboration with patients.
"Patients who join a study like this are very brave, undergoing extra risk for the benefit of people in the future," he said.
This places an enormous responsibility on the team to fully explain the procedure and risks in detail and ensure that patients know they can change their mind at any point for any reason. In the case of using Neuropixels specifically, the researchers explain to patients, who will already be having surgery for deep brain stimulation, that they’d like to record a bit of data during surgery.
Kramer and the team have found their patients to be interested in contributing to the science and research. Their reason is simple, yet altruistic: to help future patients from experiencing the same conditions.
Decades of dreamers
The advancements happening in neuroscience and neurosurgery today have been made possible by collective decades of work happening simultaneously in material science – the ability to collect more data in smaller packages – and in computation. “Computational leaps have made it much easier to turn neural signals into a decodable signal really fast, allowing us to understand them much more quickly,” Kramer said.
“They know they’re going to be helping future Parkinson’s patients,” Kramer said. “They know, intimately, what it’s like to have slowed thinking, executive function troubles or other symptoms. We hear time and again that they don’t want others to go through that same experience. It’s incredibly selfless, and we’re eternally grateful for their participation and help.”
The technological advances – and working with his patients to put those advancements to use – has Kramer thinking about where this research will go next. His hope is to continue to understand how the brain carries out these infinitely flexible cognitive functions to develop therapies for cognitive challenges some patients face.
“One of our longer-term goals is to build a closed-loop system,” Kramer said. “Sometimes we like to call it ‘smart neuromodulation.’ Can we help those struggling with cloudiness, confusion and brain fog? Can we drive the brain away from states of confusion into states of clarity by rebuilding those pathways in the brain?”
The road ahead will be challenging, but Kramer, still thinking back to the high school psychology and philosophy classes that ignited his passion, thinks there is an optimism and restless energy in place to take up the challenge.
“I think we're starting to get to that point where we can really do that and answer all those questions – and the ones I asked my teachers in school.”
Key points:
- Advancements in computation, materials science and neuroscience have allowed scientists to gain an early understanding of how the brain functions.
- The ultimate goal of technologies like Neuropixels and brian computer interface is to see if treatments can restore brain function and senses to individuals.