Researchers at the University of Washington have shown that after implanting electrodes into human brains, the persons with the implants were able to learn how to move a cursor on a computer screen just with their thoughts. The UW has posted this press release describing the research in some detail; see: http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/06/11/new-tasks-become-as-simple-as-waving-a-hand-with-brain-computer-interfaces/ And the website CNET has a popular media article that is a closer approximation to everyday English here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57588839-76/mind-controlled-cursor-may-be-easier-than-previously-thought/
For those who are hardcore and settle for nothing but the original source, the research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and it is available online prior to its paper publication; see: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/05/1221127110 What I think is really intriguing is the process that seems to be going on when one is learning the basic action. The CNET article expresses this best: NOTE: participants were persons with severe epilepsy. |While physicians were studying neuro activity to investigate seizure |signals, a separate team of bioengineers was simultaneously on the |lookout for exactly how the brains of the seven volunteers behaved |as they learned to move a cursor using their thoughts alone. It turns |out that, in as few as 10 minutes, activity went from being centered |on the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with learning new skills, |to areas seen during more automatic functions, such as waving one's |hand or kicking a ball. | |In other words, in just a matter of minutes these brains behaved as |if they had already mastered these Jedi mind tricks. | |"What we're seeing is that practice makes perfect with these tasks," |Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering |and a senior researcher involved in the study, said in a school news |release. "There's a lot of engagement of the brain's cognitive resources |at the very beginning, but as you get better at the task, those resources |aren't needed anymore and the brain is freed up." | |Rao and colleagues, who call this "distributed cortical adaptation," |published their findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the |National Academy of Sciences. They say that the electrodes on the |volunteers' brains picked up the signals that directed the cursor to |move and sent them to an amplifier and then laptop for analysis, |which in just 40 milliseconds resulted in updated cursor movement |on the screen. Now what I find fascinating is not that one can move a cursor with one's thoughts but that the process of learning how to do such an action first starts in the prefrontal cortex (where a cognitive "program" is probably assembled that will layout what needs to be done) and then this information is sent to what I assume are the somatosensory areas and the temporal lobe (see the figures in the CNET article -- it is a larger version of the image provided in the UW press release). I haven't read the PNAS article yet so my explanation above may be a little off but the notion that learning an action process starts in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and then is transferred to another brain area (freeing up resources in the PFC) is interesting and one wonders whether this works in other types of processes (e.g., I have always had problems with claims that certain types of working memory were located in specific cells in the PFC, like the feature detectors in the occipital cortex -- I though that that was just too much processing for a single cell to do). -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=26027 or send a blank email to leave-26027-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
