Talk: Sculpting New Visual Concepts into the Human Brain

Speaker: Marius Cătălin Iordan, Princeton University (grid.16750.35)
Title: Sculpting New Visual Concepts into the Human Brain
Emcee: Megan Peters
Backend host: Siddharth Suresh
Details: https://neuromatch.io/abstract?submis...
Paper link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.11...
Twitter:   / mcataliniordan  
Presented during Neuromatch Conference 3.0, Oct 26-30, 2020.

Summary: Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report a new way of acquiring conceptual knowledge by directly sculpting activity patterns in the human brain. We used a non-invasive technique (closed-loop real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging) to create novel categories of visual objects in the brain. After training, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the sculpted, but not control categories. The ability to sculpt new conceptual distinctions in the human brain, applied here to perception, has broad relevance to other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control. As such, the work opens up new frontiers in brain-machine interface design, neuroprosthetics, and neurorehabilitation.