This study was a big effort and I want to thank our participants, without whom none of this would be possible, as well as Luke Bashford, David Bjånes, Kelsie Pejsa, our neurosurgeons Brian Lee and Charles Liu, and of course Richard Andersen!
Finally, we examine neural activity in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) when visual cues were delivered without ICMS (participants were expecting ICMS to be delivered), and see that S1 encodes visual information across realistic and abstract contexts when it relates to ICMS.
We also show that the point of peak temporal simultaneity varied between our participants but was significantly different from zero in both - so we can't assume that ICMS is perfectly temporally aligned with vision.
Long story short, the participants were more likely to perceive tactile and visual cues as occurring simultaneously when visual information was more realistic, showing that visual context affects how ICMS is processed by the brain.
Reviving this account to say that the last paper from my PhD is out in final form!
Here, we look at how the timing of artificial tactile sensations (delivered via intracortical microstimulation/ICMS) is perceived relative to visual cues in two participants with spinal cord injuries. 🧠✋👀
🧠Excited to share our latest ultrasound & neurotech paper @natureportfolio.nature.com
🦾 Our previous papers demonstrated the HOW of an ultrasonic brain-machine interface in monkeys and humans. This paper highlights WHY it works.
big if true
Cats challenge standard biases in evolutionary biology. People have said to me, “What about bats? What about rodents? These groups have so many species doing all kinds of things.” And I'm like, “Yeah, because they suck.” They haven't figured out how to do anything well, so they keep trying different things.
This is the funniest science writeup I've seen in a long time. It's about why cats are so perfectly evolved 🧪
Apparently lots of other animals have "tried to be cats" and the fact that other species have so much more variation is "because they suck" 😆
www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats...
literally my thesis
Congrats to two of the Forest Neurotech team, Tyson Aflalo and Charles Guan on publishing their work from Caltech in Nature Biomedical Engineering!
"Improving Brain–Machine Interfaces with Machine Learning" 🧠⚡️
www.caltech.edu/about/news/i...
Just a reminder that you can add '-ai' to your google search and it will not show you any AI-generated overviews!
If you wouldn’t mind please add me to this list!
Quick introduction since things are taking off around here - I’m Isabelle, a researcher in sensorimotor neural prosthetics. My interests include brain computer interfaces, tactile sensation (real and artificial), neurostimulation, and motor intention 🧠🤖
This work was the third chapter of my PhD dissertation and I'm excited to see it out in the world. Many thanks to my co-authors, in particular Luke and David, for much needed help along the way!
Finally, we looked at primary somatosensory cortex (S1) during visual stimuli (without ICMS). S1 neural activity was tuned to visual information, and was highly similar across realistic and abstract conditions. So S1 represents ICMS-relevant visual information across contexts. 4/4
The realistic visual environment also affected the qualitative experience of the ICMS, suggesting that vision can help stabilize ICMS percepts in addition to extending the temporal binding window. 3/4
figure showing two plots, one for each participant. In each plot, the realistic visual condition curve is larger and wider than the abstract visual condition curve, showing that participants reported the realistic condition as simultaneous over more timing offsets than the abstract condition.
We compared realistic & abstract visual conditions, paired with intra-cortical microstimulation (ICMS) at delivered at different timing offsets. In the realistic condition, participants reported ICMS and vision as occurring simultaneously more often! 2/4
gif of a first-person arm being touched by a robotic lever
gif of a black dot on a gray background moving down along a line and then back up again
New preprint alert! Interested in human brain-machine interfaces, but wondering how they might work in the real world? We examine how artificial touch sensations are integrated with visual information for a cohesive conscious experience. 1/4
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Happy to have finally made the migration over here! I’m a brain-machine interface researcher working on the neuroscience of tactile sensations 🧠✨ Looking for relevant accounts to follow 👀
