The IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society organizes every two years a 'special topic' conference on Neural Engineering. The event was held in 2011 in Cancun, Mexico with more than 250 participants and several exciting presentations about new achievements in the field. In this special issue we present a selected subset of the papers presented during the conference that were considered particularly interesting by the organizing committee. We think they clearly show the potentials and richness of what neural engineering is and can be.