Voluntary control of brain neurons with our thought: it's possible

Ok, this looks like "another BCIs stuff". I don't think it is...I think it's something more.

With this experiment (click here to read the paper on Nature), leaded by Moran Cerf and funded by Christof Koch e ItzhakFried at Caltech (University of Technology of California), we get some additional information about attentional control, showing how strong the top-down processes are, able even to alter the competition between external images (bottom-up stimuli) and internal ones (mental representations of the same images) making the second ones win even in a disadvantage situation.

After interviewing the subjects on their tastes about actors, musicians, politicians, football teams and so on, Cerf selected 4 between the preferred images for each of the 12 epileptic patiens who participated to the study (to which, since they were undergoing a surgery for diminishing the seizures, because were pharmacological treatments-resistant, some electrodes were surgically implanted directly in the medio temporal lobe, MTL) which aroused the strongest neural activity recorded by the electrodes. With these "best" neuronal-represented images he made the patients train with some BCIs to learn how to make a mouse cursor perform some movements on a computer screen or even play videgames, just by exciting/inhibiting the involved neurons.

The first part of the experiment then, was to make the desired image (let's say, Marilyn Monroe, or Clinton) appear on the screen, just thinking about it. Later, a difficulty was added: a competitive image was merged with the target image (with different percentages of presence of one or the other figure), and the task of the patients was to make the target figure win over the distractor and be the only figure on the screen (for example, an image containing a certain percentage of Marilyn Monroe, or Clinton and another percentage of Michael Jackson, or Bush). Cerf noticed that even when the percentage of the distractor presence on the image was prominent (i.e. more than 50%), the subjects managed to make the target figure be the only represented one, and reports also that they found the task extremely interesting, because they really had the feeling that they could influence the result of what was on the display with their thought.

What Koch then adds about the outcomings of the research

“is the discovery that the part of the brain that stores the instruction ‘think of Clinton’ reaches into the medial temporal lobe and excites the set of neurons responding to Clinton, simultaneously suppressing the population of neurons representing Bush, while leaving the vast majority of cells representing other concepts or familiar person untouched.”

I think that Koch said this because he wants to point out that his 2005 theory was right, that a single neuron can recognize people, landmarks, and objects (like it happens for the place cells, found by O'Keefe and Dostrovsky), so he stresses the fact that in this research is proved that there's not a generalized activation of all the neurons in the MTL, but only the ones "related" to the task.
What I think about this last comment is that I would expect such a thing to happen, since the task was to make Clinton's figure win over Bush's figure, and obviously there's no need for the other populations that represent, let's say, the grandmother of the patient, to participate to the activation/suppression...if there is something that is pretty known is that our brain works in a very economic way, trying to "save" whenever it's possible: so it makes sense that it's not a "generalized" neuronal population's activation against Bush (all the MLT neurons against the Bush ones), but just the few ones that are involved in the task. This, at most, can prove that even few neurons can make a mental representation win the competition against a real, external image, which is perceived through one's eyes, but it doesn't look so outstanding to me to think that the activation is limited to these neurons and leaves untouched the other groups which are not involved in the moment.

Click on the following link to read the original article: Controllare volontariamente i neuroni nel nostro cervello: è possibile (articolo in italiano).

[Source: neurosciencenews.com]