Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

PASADENA, Calif. - By decoding signals coming from neurons, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have confirmed that an area of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPF) is involved in the planning stages of movement, that instantaneous flicker of time when we contemplate moving a hand or other limb. The work has implications for the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply by thinking.

By piggybacking on therapeutic work being conducted on epileptic patients, Daniel Rizzuto, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Richard Andersen, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, was able to predict where a target the patient was looking at was located, and also where the patient was going to move his hand. The work currently appears in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

...Unlike most labs doing this type of research, Andersen's lab is looking at the planning areas of the brain rather than the primary motor area of the brain, because they believe the planning areas are less susceptible to damage. "In the case of a spinal cord injury," says Rizzuto, "communication to and from the primary motor cortex is cut off." But the brain still performs the computations associated with planning to move. "So if we can tap into the planning computations and decode where a person is thinking of moving," he says, then it just becomes an engineering problem--the person can be hooked up to a computer where he can move a cursor by thinking, or can even be attached to a robotic arm.

Andersen notes, "Dan's results are remarkable in showing that the human ventral prefrontal cortex, an area previously implicated in processing information about objects, also processes the intentions of subjects to make movements. This research adds ventral prefrontal cortex to the list of candidate brain areas for extracting signals for neural prosthetics applications."