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DMac
29th October 2010, 08:09 AM
Fascinating.

Controlling Individual Cortical Nerve Cells by Human Thought (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027133158.htm)

snip


ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2010) — Five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried of UCLA, and their colleagues discovered that a single neuron in the human brain can function much like a sophisticated computer and recognize people, landmarks, and objects, suggesting that a consistent and explicit code may help transform complex visual representations into long-term and more abstract memories.

Now Koch and Fried, along with former Caltech graduate student and current postdoctoral fellow Moran Cerf, have found that individuals can exert conscious control over the firing of these single neurons -- despite the neurons' location in an area of the brain previously thought inaccessible to conscious control -- and, in doing so, manipulate the behavior of an image on a computer screen.

The work, which appears in a paper in the October 28 issue of the journal Nature, shows that "individuals can rapidly, consciously, and voluntarily control neurons deep inside their head," says Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech.