A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information

Condensed Matter journal club

A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information

  • Event time: 11:30am
  • Event date: 21st June 2013
  • Speaker: Nico Kronberg (Formerly School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
  • Location: Room 2511,

Event details

Abstract

A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an "encoder" rat performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a "decoder" rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the encoder rat's brain. These results demonstrated that a complex system was formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process, and store information and, hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and for biological computing devices.
Scientific Reports 3 article 1319 (2013)
pdf version

Authors

Miguel Pais-Vieira, Mikhail Lebedev, Carolina Kunicki, Jing Wang, Miguel A. L. Nicolelis

About Condensed Matter journal club

Given the diversity of research in the CM group, chosen topics vary widely. We tend to stick to high-impact journals - Nature, Science, PNAS and PRL have been popular - but this is not prescriptive..

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