Computer-Controlled Brain Implant Improve Mental Function

A landmark study has demonstrated how a brain implant can deliver targeted bursts of electrical stimulation to improve cognitive functions. In real-time, the implant senses electrical biomarkers of cognitive deficits and responds by stimulating specific brain regions, Rich Haridy reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: The study is the culmination of years of work homing on the parts of the brain responsible for cognitive control.

The new study, published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, is the culmination of years of work homing on the parts of the brain responsible for cognitive control.

Impairments to cognitive control can be found in a number of mental health disorders, from depression to obsessive control disorder (OCD.) These cognitive control deficits manifest in inflexible thought processes.

Alik Widge, from the University of Minnesota Medical School, says the inability to easily shift from one thought process to another is a key feature of many mental illnesses.

“An example might include a person with depression who just can't get out of a ‘stuck’ negative thought,” says Widge. “Because it is so central to mental illness, finding a way to improve it could be a powerful new way to treat those illnesses.”

A 2019 study by Widge and colleagues found electrically stimulating the ventral internal capsule/ventral striatum (VCVS) areas of the brain could enhance cognitive control. The earlier work not only demonstrated deep brain stimulation of VCVS regions improved cognitive control when participants were tasked with a cognitive control test, but it identified specific neural biomarkers that corresponded with clinical improvements. From those earlier findings the researchers developed an algorithm that can detect, in real-time, when the brain is struggling with cognitive control tasks.

When lapses in cognitive control are detected the system delivers short bursts of electrical stimulation to VCVS regions rapidly enhancing cognitive control performance.

“This system can read brain activity, ‘decode’ from that when a patient is having difficulty, and apply a small burst of electrical stimulation to the brain to boost them past that difficulty,” explains Widge.

“The analogy I often use is an electric bike. When someone's pedaling but having difficulty, the bike senses it and augments it. We've made the equivalent of that for human mental function.”

The pilot study testing this experimental system recruited 12 subjects undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. A few of the patients in the study did report the stimulation relieving symptoms of anxiety, but Widge is clear in noting this research can only focus on enhancing cognitive control and further work is needed before clinical trials can begin testing this kind of invasive brain implant on subjects with severe anxiety disorders.

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