Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Recent advancements in the field of neuroprothetics could make it possible to learn more about how the brain stores and accesses information while also providing new insights into conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, researchers claim in a new study.
Writing in the journal Neuron, Dr. Karen Moxon, a professor at the Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering Science and Health Systems, and Guglielmo Foffani from San Pablo University in Spain construct a framework to show how brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can be used as tools to help address the “fundamental questions in neuroscience.”
Studying brain-machine interfaces to learn about the mind
While BMIs are typically used in the form of neuroprosthetics to help individuals recover from the loss of motor function, observing their operation may also help scientists study the processes through which a person’s brain to encode new data. In this way, the subject of BMI experiments could provide real-time insight into various processes that take place in the brain.
“The observed subjects of BMI experiments can also be considered as indirect observers of their own neurophysiological activity, and the relationship between observed neurons and (artificial) behavior can be genuinely causal rather than indirectly correlative” – characteristics that defy the “classical object-observer duality,” according to Dr. Moxon and Foffani.
This makes neuroprosthetics “particularly appealing for investigating how information is encoded and decoded by neural circuits in real time, how this coding changes with physiological learning and plasticity, and how it is altered in pathological conditions,” they added. “Within neuroengineering, BMI is like a tree that opens its branches into many traditional engineering fields, but also extends deep roots into basic neuroscience beyond neuroprosthetics.”
Using neuroprosthetics to provide real-time brain feedback
Dr. Moxon, then a postdoctoral researcher in Drexel’s medical school, participated in the first study to ever examine how the brain could be connected to a operate a prosthetic limb, and she and her co-author cite examples from their own research they were able to isolate and study new regions of the brain thanks to advances in BMI technology over the years.
“We believe neuroprosthetics can be a powerful tool to address fundamental questions of neuroscience,” she said. “These subjects can provide valuable data as indirect observers of their own neural activity that are modulated during the experiments they are taking part in. This allows researchers to pinpoint a causal relationship between neural activity and the subject’s behavior rather than one that is indirectly correlative.”
Neuroprosthetics, Dr. Moxon added, could help scientists overcome obstacles to brain-related research by proving the direct correlation between a subject’s action and the behavior of their brain cells to prove that neurons are the actual cause of a specific behavior. In addition to acting like a surrogate body part, the BMI device can provide real-time feedback from the brain.
BMIs could lead to new epilepsy, Parkinson’s treatments
“Subjects can be viewed as indirect observers of their own neurophysiological activity during neuroprosthetic experiments,” Dr. Moxon said. “To move the prosthesis they must think both about the motor functions involved and the goal of the movement. As they see the movement of the prosthetic their brain adjusts in real time to continue planning the movement.”
This is done without the regular feedback from the moving body part, since the prosthetic unit acts like a stand-in for that part of the body, she explained. This separation of planning and control of movement was essential to her research on how the brain encodes for the passage of time, she added, noting that this is just one example of research into the BMI-brain function link.
Dr. Moxon said that there have been “tremendous advancements in neuroprosthetic technology” over the past 15 years. “The BMI research paradigm opens doors for a new understanding of how we control our own brain function including neural plasticity,” she added, “and this has the potential to lead to new treatments and therapies for epilepsy, Parkinson’s and other pathologies.”
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