facilitation and restoration of cognitive function in primate prefrontal cortex by a neuroprosthesis...

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17 . 10 . 12

Facilitation and restoration of cognitive function in primate prefrontal cortex by a neuroprosthesis that utilizes minicolumn-specific neural firing or Neural implants could spark better decisions

• electronic brain implant

• short-term memory and decision-making

in primates

• Alzheimer’s disease, dementia

• neurons “fire” when they receive an

input from another neuron

• the pattern of this activity  – where and

when the neurons fire   – can be detected

and recorded

• 5 rhesus macaques

• 2 years

• pool of 5000 images

•RESULTS:

• 75% correct matches

•40% longest waiting interval & maximum

amount of images to choose from

• enhancing the animals’ decision-making

process

• implant kicked in whenever the neuronal

activity in layers 2/3 resembled that seen

when an incorrect decision was being made.

• improving avg. performance by 10 to 20 %

• hardest task: 2 rather than 3 seconds to

correctly identify the image.

• monkeys on cocaine

• implant turned off–performance dropped 10%

• implant turned on – back to normal

• just below levels seen in monkeys who hadn’t

been given cocaine or an

implant

Concerns:

•it is not clear what exactly is going on

• step around understanding, by recognising

what a correct decision looks like, recording

that pattern and playing it back

• patterns of activity - specific to each monkey

• invasive nature of implants - inflammation

and scarring

http://engineeringevil.com/2012/09/20/neural-implants-could-spark-better-decisions/ http://iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/9/5/056012 /pdf/1741-2552_9_5_056012.pdf