VIDEOS

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

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

Movie S1 Legend
The movie sequence depicts a dyad of rats transferring cortical motor information via the brain-to-brain interface. The yellow circle indicates the correct choice in each behavioral chamber. The audio track is the spiking activity of an ensemble of M1 neurons. Immediately after the encoder’s reward, a pattern of ICMS is delivered to the decoder rat’s primary motor cortex. Note that, after the decoder makes a correct lever response, the encoder rat is rewarded for the second time during the course of a single trial.

Dr. Miguel Nicolelis Explains Brain to Brain Interface Study Published in Scientific Reports, February 28, 2013

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First Brain-To-Brain Interface Allows Transmission Of Tactile And Motor Information Between Rats (PDF)

VIDEOS

Infrared Movie S1: Introduction to the structure of the task. Two views of a rat performing a single trial of the IR-discrimination task. The IR light comes on, and when the rat orients toward the stimulus, an IR-signal is registered by an IR-detector on the rat’s head, and S1 is stimulated with a frequency that depends on detector’s output (Figure 1e). Guided by microstimulation, the rat approaches the reward port to receive water. In the floor-level view, you can see the infrared detector attached to the rat’s head. The audio track is the output of the microstimulator, which is not available to the rat.

Infrared Movie S2:  Example of rat performing IR discrimination (top-down view). Movie shows three trials in a well-trained rat navigating the chamber actively foraging for IR sources. The ports are 90 degrees apart.

Infrared Movie S3:  Example of IR-discrimination in difficult version of task. Multiple trials in a well-trained animal on a more difficult version of the task than shown in Movie 2:  the reward ports are only 30° apart. Correct and incorrect trials are indicated.

Infrared Movie S4: Sample trials from a session with ‘blank’ trials interleaved. On random trials the IR light is activated, but is uncoupled from ICMS. Trial types (‘stim’ versus ‘no-stim’ trials) are indicated before each trial.

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Neuroprosthesis Gives Rats the Ability to “Touch” Infrared Light (PDF)

Dr. Rui Costa, Principal Investigator in the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, received the 2012 Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award. Dr. Costa, a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Nicolelis Lab, received the award during the society’s annual meeting in New Orleans in October. The award recognizes Dr. Costa’s work making “significant advances to complex neuroscience and neurological problems with elegant and innovative approaches” (from the Society for Neuroscience website). Additional information is available at Dr. Costa’s web page and the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award web site.

Large-scale brain recordings. (Top) Four multielectrode arrays with 448 electrodes were inserted in rhesus monkey motor (M1) and sensory (S1) cortices of both hemispheres. (Bottom-left) Waveforms of recorded neurons from each of the 1874 cortical neurons from one monkey. Waveforms are colored separately to indicate electrode location – top to bottom: Left M1, left S1, right M1, right S1. (Bottom-right) Raster plot showing activity of all recorded neurons vs. time during a single 10 second window.

DURHAM, N.C. – A milestone in a neuroscience experiment was announced this week by researchers at the laboratory of Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., PhD, at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering, with the recording of close to 2,000 brain cells at work in a primate.

By documenting the firing patterns of 1,874 neurons, the Duke team recorded its largest sample of brain electrical activity produced by populations of interconnected single neurons.

The finding advances the quest of the Nicolelis’ lab and its partners, which form the worldwide scientific consortium named the Walk Again Project™, to build a whole-body exoskeleton that could enable paralyzed people to regain motor and sensory abilities using brain activity to control the apparatus. The Walk Again Project™ aims to unveil the first version of this exoskeleton in the opening ceremony of the FIFA Soccer World Cup in June 2014.

“The accuracy of neuroprosthetic devices to help paralyzed people clearly improves with the number of simultaneously recorded brain neurons, so to get high performance from these devices for multiple degrees of freedom in movement, we need to record from thousands of neurons,” said Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke Medicine.

“This is the first time that we have recorded more than a thousand neurons from volumes of cortical tissue,” Nicolelis said. “The cutting edge technology used to obtain these recordings, including our newly designed high-density wireless interface, opens a wide range of new opportunities for our neuroprosthetic work.”

Since publishing their pioneering studies on brain-machine interfaces in the late 1990s, Nicolelis and his colleagues have worked to record larger samples of cortical cells simultaneously to produce more naturally functioning neuroprosthetic devices.

“It is exciting for us to be able to sample from close to two thousand single neurons in just one recording session,” commented Mikhail Lebedev, senior research scientist in the Nicolelis laboratory. “In the not so distant past researchers were able to record from just one to two neurons at a time, and it would take them several years to collect the amount of neural data we are now recording in a single afternoon.”

The next step is to incorporate the brain-machine interface technology into a specially engineered exoskeleton created by researchers led by Dr. Gordon Cheng at the Munich Technical University.

The Nicolelis group members who worked on this project included Mikhail Lebedev, Dragan Dimitrov, Gary Lehew, Peter Ifft, James Meloy, David Schwarz, Katie Zhuang, Zheng Li, Arjun Ramakrishnan, Shankari Sankaranarayani, Andrew Tate, Tamara Phillips and Laura Oliveira.

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Nearly Two Thousand Brain Cells Recorded at One Time (PDF)

“Someday in the near future, quadriplegic patients will take advantage of this technology not only to move their arms and hands and to walk again, but also to sense the texture of objects placed in their hands, or experience the nuances of the terrain on which they stroll with the help of a wearable robotic exoskeleton,” said study leader Miguel Nicolelis, MD, PhD, professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering.

Without moving any part of their real bodies, the monkeys used their electrical brain activity to direct the virtual hands of an avatar to the surface of virtual objects and, upon contact, were able to differentiate their textures.  Read more at Dukehealth.org

Read Nature Research Article

Active tactile exploration using a brain–machine–brain interface

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Read Duke News Press Release

Novel Spinal Cord Stimulator Sparks Hope for Parkinson’s Disease Treatment

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Spinal Cord Stimulation Restores Locomotion in Animal Models of Parkinson’s Disease

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View Supplementary Research Video

The Duke team is working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) on technology they hope will one day help those with paralysis regain the ability to walk.

READ RESEARCH ARTICLE

Monkey’s thoughts make robot walk from across the globe

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View New York Times article

Monkey’s Thoughts Propel Robot, a Step That May Help Humans

Illustration by Kenn Brown, Mondolithic Studios

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, a pioneering neuroscientist
argues that brain-wave control of machines will allow the paralyzed
to walk and portends a future of mind melds and thought downloads

Excerpt adapted from Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines—and How It Will Change Our Lives

Almost every time one of my scientific manuscripts returned from the mandatory peer-review process during the past three decades, I had to cope with the inevitable recommendation that all scraps of speculative thinking about our ability to interface brains and machines should be removed from the papers. More often than not, other neuroscientists who reviewed these papers before publication did not wish to entertain the notion that this research could lend support to more daring scientific dreams in the future. During those painful reckonings, I would fantasize about the day when I could rescue those speculative ideas and liberate them for others to consider and contemplate. Our progress in the laboratory means that the time to tell others has finally arrived.

While I have been confronting the ultraconservative culture of academia, a number of science-fiction writers and movie directors have been speculating unreservedly and at times overindulging in the excesses of their fertile imaginations. During 2009 alone, two Hollywood mega productions, Surrogates and Avatar, portrayed the stereotype of scientists controlling, harming, killing and conquering people with their technological wizardry. In these films, brain-machine interfaces allowed human beings to live, love and fight by proxy. Their full-body avatars were left to do the hard work of roaming the universe and, in some cases, seeking to annihilate an entire alien race on behalf of their human masters.

Let me present an alternative view on the coming Age of the Machines. After working and thinking long and hard about the impact of brain-wave-controlled robots, often called brainmachine interfaces, I see a future filled with blunt optimism and eager anticipation, rather than one plagued by gloom and calamity. Perhaps because so little about the true dimensions of this future can be conceived with certainty, I feel an intense calling to embrace the amazing opportunities that freeing our brains from the limits of our terrestrial bodies can bring to our species. In fact, I wonder how anyone could think otherwise, given the tremendous humanistic prospects that brain-machine interface research promises to unleash. To continue reading, click here to download the full Mind out of Body (book excerpt) PDF.