Monkeys show amazing learning curve with thought-controlled prosthetics

Darkfrog submitted, created time 7 months 1 week (www.nytimes.com)

Monkeys with small (as in a mm or so wide) grid implanted just beneath their skulls have shown themselves able to control a mechanical arm with their thoughts.

This is an NYT writeup of an article originally published in Nature. Scientists first taught the monkeys how to control a mechanical arm with a joystick, then implanted a small grid, only a mm or so wide, onto the motor centers of their brains. The monkeys' own arms were then gently restrained. The scientists used a computer to move the arm at first. The article uses the expression, "teaching with biofeedback

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What to Do, or How to Do It? M1 Neurons Control It.

Spontaneous brain activity causes 'unforced errors'

jiangyun submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.newscientist.com)

The reason why even professional basketball and soccer players sometimes miss an easy shot may be partly explained by spontaneous fluctuations of electrical activity within the brain, a study suggests.

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Temporal Processing in Primate Motor Control:Relation Between Cortical and EMG Activity By Olivier F. L. Manette and Marc A. Maier

eldecog submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (www.discover8.com)

We investigated spatio-temporal information processing
in the primate motor system. Corticomotoneuronal (CM)
cells provide monosynaptic excitatory connections from motor
cortex to spinal motoneurons and contribute causally to the
time-varying electromyogram (EMG) of their target muscle. A
multilayer perceptron (MLP) was used to evaluate the transfer
function between neural activity of single CM cells and their
target muscle EMG, using data from in-vivo recordings in primate
motor cortex. For an optimal MLP performance, i.e

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: Backpropagation biological motor system neural network applications perceptron transfer function motor activity neural activity motor cortex MLP

Actor's and observer's primary motor cortices stabilize similarly after seen or heard motor actions

channel submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.pnas.org)

"We quantified rhythmic brain activity, recorded with whole-scalp magnetoencephalography (MEG), of 13 healthy subjects who were performing, seeing, or hearing the tapping of a drum membrane with the right index finger. This delay likely reflects proprioceptive input to the cortex, available only during own actions, and therefore could be related to the brain signature of the sense of agency. The strikingly similar motor cortex reactivity during the first and third person actions expands previous data on brain mechanisms of intersubjective understanding

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: brain rhythms intersubjectivity magnetoencephalography mirror neurons motor cortex