Topic: hippocampal closed-loop Brain-Machine Interface

Spatial navigation is normally yoked to the motor actions responsible for travel. Neural populations in CA1 exert influence on navigational outcomes, but this coupling makes it challenging to isolate abstract representations of travel from concrete motor actions. In this work, we present an experimental paradigm that uses a hippocampal closed-loop Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) to decouple running locomotion from the cognitive map. This BMI associates neural activity with locations on a 1D Virtual Reality (VR) track, and then translates those locations into contextually appropriate actions (Fig