Brain-Machine Interfaces beyond Neuroprosthetics

Abstract

The field of invasive brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) is typically associated with neuroprosthetic applications aiming to recover loss of motor function. However, BMIs also represent a powerful tool to address fundamental questions in neuroscience. The observed subjects of BMI experiments can also be considered as indirect observers of their own neurophysiological activity, and the relationship between observed neurons and (artificial) behavior can be genuinely causal rather than indirectly correlative. These two characteristics defy the classical object-observer duality, making BMIs particularly appealing for investigating how information is encoded and decoded by neural circuits in real time, how this coding changes with physiological learning and plasticity, and how it is altered in pathological conditions. Within neuroengineering, BMI is like a tree that opens its branches into many traditional engineering fields, but also extends deep roots into basic neuroscience beyond neuroprosthetics.

Beta band oscillations in motor cortex reflect neural population signals that delay movement onset

“…While neurofeedback was pioneered by rewarding changes in firing rates of single motor cortical cells (Fetz, 1969), learning to control cortical local field potential (LFP) features has been proposed (Fetz, 2013; Moxon and Foffani, 2015) and subsequently demonstrated (Engelhard et al, 2013; So et al, 2014). In this study, three macaque monkeys with chronic microwire electrode arrays implanted in their motor cortices were trained in a sequential neurofeedback and arm-reaching task.…”

Rapid control and feedback rates enhance neuroprosthetic control

“…BMI paradigms are ideally suited for perturbation experiments because they provide a novel, experimenter-defined sensorimotor pathway2930. In contrast to the natural motor system, where control rates may not be easy to manipulate, BMI can distinguish the roles of control and feedback rates in the sensorimotor loop.…”

From Enlightenment to Cyborgs

“…The Technophilus soul, on the other hand, which will inspire the mechanistic (the mechanical philosophy) and deterministic current of the progressive techno-scientism, it is the product of its time, conceived in the sign of the Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics, praising, as does Turgot 19 , to progress as a goal to which mankind is inextricably tending (which also meant to legitimize the colonialist, conqueror and racist messianism, who pretended to civilize peoples judged inferior for their institutions or their development), and to the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. A position clearly anticipated by the philosopher and mathematician Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) [14]: "Such is the object of the work I have undertaken; the result of which will be to show, from reasoning and from facts, that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us."…”

“…On 7 May 1794, Robespierre made the Convention decreed the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul, appointing himself -on the occasion of the Feast of the Supreme Being -the highest priest of this evanescent divinity. 19 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron of Laulne (1727-1781), was a major political and intellectual figure in pre-revolutionary France, a well-respected social philosopher and political economist. For Turgot, history is different from nature, as opposed to it, it does not always reproduce in the same way.…”