BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — Animals learned to hold prefrontal cortex population activity near a preset target using visual neurofeedback delivered through an intracortical brain-computer interface (BCI), researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reported in a preprint uploaded to bioRxiv on August 23, 2026. The work has not been peer reviewed.
The team noted that arousal levels fluctuate during task performance — low arousal is associated with drowsiness, high arousal with stress — and these shifts manifest as neural activity fluctuations that degrade performance. The researchers asked whether moment-by-moment neurofeedback could counteract those fluctuations and regulate arousal.
Animals reduced neural fluctuations on timescales ranging from seconds to hundreds of milliseconds, and arousal-related regulation of neural activity was associated with BCI use. The authors suggest neurofeedback may enhance or restore regulation of neural activity, with potential clinical applications in conditions where such regulation is impaired. The findings are limited to animal experiments and have not been tested in humans.