Date post: | 01-Sep-2014 |
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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