BCIs Reveal New Insights about the Brain

Image credit: Moritz Kindler via Unsplash

From enabling communication with loved ones, to the use of household devices, through to operating a prosthetic limb: the emerging advances already seen with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) reflect the extraordinary possibilities for their future role in healthcare.

Alongside this clinical application of BCIs, early models are also providing researchers with a novel way of better understanding the brain – as this feature published this month by Nature explains.

“Results are overturning assumptions about brain anatomy, for example, revealing that regions often have much fuzzier boundaries and job descriptions than was thought,” writes science journalist, Miryam Naddaf.

“Such studies are also helping researchers to work out how BCIs themselves affect the brain and, crucially, how to improve the devices.”

One example of this, Naddaf writes, is the way BCI recordings have shown that the regions of the brain are likely not as discrete as once thought.

Such was the case for Stanford University’s Dr Frank Willett, whose team is developing a BCI relating to speech. It came as a surprise to find that far greater “intermixed” areas of the brain were involved in motor control and speech production, challenging past beliefs about how the brain works.

In such a rapidly emerging space, broadening our understanding in such a way only stands to benefit the sector – both for helping restore patients’ function following paralysis and future BCI technologies.

Read the story in full via Nature.