Thought to Action
Prof. Andersen
[Abstract]
To explore how intentions may be used for neural prosthetic applications, we have implanted microelectrode
arrays in a high-level cortical area, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), in human tetraplegics. We find that
human PPC is very high dimensional, coding a variety of variables including movements of both hands and both shoulders, observed actions, cognitive strategies, and memory based decisions. This high dimensional coding is an advantage for neural prosthetics as a great deal of information can be read out from a single array in PPC.
Tetraplegic patients cannot feel their bodies below the level of injury. To provide back somatosensation, in one tetraplegic participant we have intracortically microstimulated the primary somatosensory cortex with small electrical currents through microelectrode arrays. The participant reported natural quality cutaneous and proprioceptive sensations: promising results for allowing natural-seeming somatosensory feedback for more dexterous brain-control of robotic limbs.
[Biography]
Prof. Andersen obtained a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of California, San Francisco with thesis advisor Michael Merzenich, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Vernon Mountcastle at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was Assistant and Associate Professor at the Salk Institute, Associate and Full Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and is currently the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience in the Biology Division at Caltech and holds the T & C Chen Brain-machine Interface Center Leadership Chair. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Member of the National Academy of Medicine, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Member of the International Neuropsychological Symposium.
Prof. Andersen studies the neurobiological underpinnings of brain processes including the senses of sight, hearing, balance and touch, the neural mechanisms of action, and the development of neural prosthetics. He has trained 60 postdoctoral and doctoral students who now work in academia and industry; 35 currently hold tenure or tenure track faculty positions at major research universities throughout the world. He has published approximately 140 technical articles and edited two books.
