O Canada — your wacky scientists are at it again. And this time, the intense minds over on the University of Western Ontario have their third eye set on a undeniable precognitive prize. Avoiding the messier open-skull, electrode-imbedding alternative, researchers on the Centre for Brain and Mind employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to successfully predict the action of participants’ hands before they’d moved a muscle. After a year of brain-scanning trials, scientists learned to accurately foretell which signals were associated with one in every of three set actions: grabbing the pinnacle of an object, its bottom, or just reaching out to the touch it. Like our clairvoyant cousin’s previous beverage-predicting breakthrough , the spoils of this study visit prosthetic limb motion control and the paralyzed who’ll use it. We all know what you’re thinking, but we aren’t going to make the plain Thing joke here. Instead, we need to wonder — What Would Ms. Cleo Do? Full release after the break, but you already knew that.
By Communications Staff
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Bringing the genuine world into the brain scanner, researchers on the University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind (http://www.uwo.ca/its/brain/) can now determine the action someone was planning, mere moments before that action is essentially executed.
The findings were published this week within the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience, within the paper, “Decoding Action Intentions from Preparatory Brain Activity in Human Parieto-Frontal Networks.”
“This can be a considerable leap forward in our understanding of the way the human brain plans actions,” says Jason Gallivan, a Western Neuroscience PhD student, who was the 1st author at the paper.
Over the process the only-year study, human subjects had their brain activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed considered one of three hand movements: grasping the pinnacle of an object, grasping the underside of the item, or just reaching out and touching the item. The team found that by means of the signals from many brain regions, they can predict, better than chance, which of the actions the volunteer was merely meaning to do, seconds later.
“Neuroimaging allows us to watch how action planning unfolds within human brain areas while not having to insert electrodes directly into the human brain. It truly is obviously far less intrusive,” explains Western Psychology professor Jody Culham, who was the paper’s senior author.
Gallivan says the recent findings may also have important clinical implications: “With the ability to predict a human’s desired movements using brain signals takes us one step towards using those signals to govern prosthetic limbs in movement-impaired patient populations, like those that be afflicted by spinal cord injuries or locked-in syndrome.”
This research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). A past recipient of the CIHR Brain Star Award, Gallivan is funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) graduate scholarship.
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