Topic: mental imagery

We have been developing Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using electrocorticography (ECoG) [1] , which is recorded by electrodes implanted on brain surface, and magnetoencephalography (MEG) [2] , which records the cortical activities non-invasively, for the clinical applications. The invasive BCI using ECoG has been applied for severely paralyzed patient to restore the communication and motor function. The non-invasive BCI using MEG has been applied as a neurofeedback tool to modulate some pathological neural activities to treat some neuropsychiatric disorders. Although these techniques have bee

Several lines of research have demonstrated that internally generated sensory experience - such as during memory, dreaming and mental imagery - activates similar neural representations as externally triggered perception. This overlap raises a fundamental challenge: how is the brain able to keep apart signals reflecting imagination and reality? In a series of online psychophysics experiments combined with computational modelling, we investigated to what extent imagination and perception are confused when the same content is simultaneously imagined and perceived. We found that simultaneous congr

Reinstating details of previously seen stimuli given a recall cue is a common cognitive function. Studies suggest that such recollection involves hippocampus-mediated top-down reactivation of neural ensembles active during encoding, yet the neural mechanisms of such generative retrieval remain unknown. We formulate a biologically plausible hypothesis where transient cholinergic modulation, known to enhance backpropagated action potentials and trigger recall, initiates backward signals from sparse neurons discriminatively representing the cue to cortical areas encoding the trace. These signals