Neuroscience 2008: Brain, meet machine; machine, meet brain
I’m a sucker for the rather trendy area of brain-machine interfaces, which is why I poked my nose into the symposium on Advanced Neurotechnologies for Chronic Neural Interfaces this afternoon. This is the kind of work that aims to take brain activity and use it to control prosthetics, or even to control an individual’s own limb. The first speaker was Eberhard Fetz of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose team recently published this paper (here’s the Nature News story) on controlling muscles directly with electrical activity from neurons routed through a computer.
I was interested in what he sees in the future of this technology, and the next steps he and his team are now taking to advance their recent work. While their recent Nature paper connected brain activity directly to muscles, Fetz also talked about the possibility of connecting certain parts of the brain to other parts, to induce plasticity and remapping. This could be of use in order to remodel bits of the brain to perform a function that has been lost through damage or disease, for example.
He also mentioned that his colleague Ted Berger, who is at the University of Southern California, is working on ‘cognitive prosthetics’ – computer programs that simulate the activity in a particular brain area that may have been damaged, and can therefore sub in for it in a network. For example, damage to the CA3 region in the hippocampus is devastating to memory; Berger is working on a CA3 model in order to reconnect the dentate gyrus, upstream, with with another part of the hippocampus, CA1.
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