Asked about the major award he just won, Brown University brain scientist John P. Donoghue reaches across his desk for his invitation to the upcoming ceremony in Germany.

He opens it carefully and points to the names of the eminent scientists who will be there with him. “I’m flattered,” Donoghue says. “I’m honored to be among them.”

True, that’s what everyone says at times like this. But something about the way Donoghue, the son of a bricklayer, runs his fingers over the linen-white invitation makes you think he really means it.

Donoghue directs Brown’s Brain Science Program, and he has won the 2007 K.J. Zülch Prize from the Max Planck Society for an achievement that’s reminiscent of the science fiction movies he’d enjoyed as a child: Donoghue and his team developed a brain implant that has enabled four paralyzed people to control a computer cursor simply by thinking about it. With their brain signals detected and decoded through an elaborate electronic system, their thoughts opened e-mail and adjusted the television, or opened and closed the hand of a prosthetic arm.

How did he do it? Donoghue, 58, again has a predictable, humble reply: “I’m surrounded by so many people who are so much smarter than I. It’s a team.”

He seems to mean that, too.

Colleagues say that that’s precisely the nature of Donoghue’s genius. He knows how to pull people and ideas together, to inspire and steer collaboration, and to penetrate and combine the far-flung fields of neuroscience, engineering, computer science and mathematics.

“It’s that ability to bring a group of people with different backgrounds, with different expertise, to work on complex problems that John does so well,” says Dr. Leigh R. Hochberg, an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School and a researcher on Donoghue’s team in Providence.

“He can grasp the big picture like nobody else I know,” says Dr. Selim Suner, an emergency medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital who had worked with Donoghue as an undergraduate and who continues to do research in his lab. “You give him a fact — ‘listen, this is what I found’ — he’ll take that little fact and still draw the big picture for you that you would not in a million years imagine.…

“He’s brilliant. You wouldn’t know that unless you work with him for a year or two.”

The Zülch award is Germany’s highest honor for neurological research. Each year it goes to two scientists, and this year Donoghue is sharing the prize (50,000 euros or about $68,300) with Graeme Clark, an Australian who developed the multiple-channel cochlear implant, the first cochlear implant that reliably enabled deaf people to understand speech. Donoghue will travel to Cologne to receive the award Friday.

Previous winners of the Zülch Prize include Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner, who discovered the infectious proteins known as prions; Sam Berkovic, who determined the genetic basis of epilepsy; and Fred Gage, who helped discover that the adult brain is capable of producing new cells.

It’s been a good summer for Donoghue. On Aug. 2, Brown announced that Donoghue’s team was among three groups to receive a $6.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop the next generation of his brain implant system, called BrainGate. The others sharing the grant are Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, the private, for-profit company that Donoghue and others founded to build and test the system; and the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center at Case Western Reserve University.

The grant will finance work that Donoghue expects to take BrainGate leaps and bounds into the future. The original BrainGate is a bulky contraption. An electrode array the size of baby aspirin sits on the part of the brain that controls arm motion. It picks up brain signals and transmits them along wires running through the skull to a connector on top of the patient’s head and then to a cigar-box-sized amplifier connected to a cart piled with computer equipment.

The new system will be wireless and tiny. The microelectrode and the processing equipment will be combined into a thin flexible implant that will communicate wirelessly with — instead of a cart of computer equipment —– a device the size of a Palm Pilot. Additionally, BrainGate will be coupled with a system, developed in Cleveland, that uses electronic impulses to trigger muscle movements. In this way, paralyzed people may be able to bypass their injuries and make simple movements.

Donoghue grew up in Arlington, Mass., the eldest of four children of a bricklayer who never finished high school and a book-loving housewife. He didn’t dream of becoming a scientist — “I’m not sure I knew what a scientist was in those days” — but he did enjoy watching science-fiction movies and fixing gadgets. He played in a rock band; he was the one always building better amplifiers.

He went to Boston University, thinking of becoming a doctor, but, instead, after college he ended up working as a technician for brain researchers at the Walter E. Fernald State School, an institution for the mentally retarded in Waltham, Mass. That sparked his interest in neuroscience and his love of research.

Eventually he came to Brown to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience. (That’s where he met his wife, Karen Kerman, now a pediatric neurologist who directs pediatric neurorehabilitation at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. They have two sons, Josh, 20, who is studying neuroscience at Brown, and Noah, 17.)

In 1984, Donoghue returned to Brown and started the research that eventually would lead to BrainGate.

That’s when Suner, the emergency medicine doctor, went to work in Donoghue’s lab. “He’s got such an infectious personality,” Suner said. “He was setting up his lab, doing some of his experiments in a corner. He’d call me over and say, ‘Hey, check this out.’ ”

Suner was an engineering student at the time; Donoghue’s enthusiasm steered him into medicine.

Hochberg, the neurologist, took a neuroscience course taught by Donoghue as an undergraduate. Although he always intended to become a doctor, he credits Donoghue with drawing him into neurology and scientific research. “He’s a phenomenal teacher,” Hochberg says.

In those days, Donoghue was interested in listening to the brain — in detecting and deciphering the signals of neurons, to understand how the brain functions.

“The only way you can hear the conversations of neurons is to have microelectrodes implanted,” he says.

By the 1990s he realized that those microelectrodes, by collecting brain signals, might be able to help people in very practical ways — people whose brains could no longer communicate with their muscles, such as those with spinal cord injury or neuromuscular diseases.

He started making the connections among many fields of scholarship. Richard Normann of the University of Utah developed the early version of the microelectrode array, a silicon chip with 100 hair-thin electrodes. The next challenge was processing the brain’s multitudinous signals fast enough: the time between thinking of a motion and executing it had to be less than two-tenths of second. That required mathematicians and engineers to come up with the formulas that decoded the signals and the hardware that moved them through smoothly. Getting it fast enough “was just at the edge of what we could do,” Donoghue says.

Donoghue recalls two critical moments in his years of work.

The first involved the monkey. In the laboratory, the monkey had learned how to play a simple video game, using a joystick. The researchers implanted a microelectrode array in the monkey’s brain, and connected this brain chip to the computer. Then they disconnected the joystick.

With the joystick now useless, the monkey played the game anyway — moving the cursor by thinking about it. This showed that the system could convert thought into action.

The second big moment came a few years later when the researchers asked their first human subject, Matthew Nagle, to think about moving his arm. Nagle was quadriplegic, his spinal cord severed at the neck, and the microelectrode had just been implanted on his brain. Until that moment, it was not known whether nerve cells could still fire after lying dormant for years in the motor cortex of a paralyzed person. Equally important, it wasn’t known whether merely thinking about movement would be enough to get those neurons firing.

They asked Nagle to imagine moving his arm and his hand. As he did so, the scribbles of his brain signals changed their pattern.

That’s when Donoghue and his team knew their system could work.

ffreyer@projo.com