BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — Stanford neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth's Human Neural Circuitry program at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute uses noninvasive electrode arrays and deep brain recording electrodes in an inpatient setting to collect brain activity with millisecond precision, aiming to decode the neural mechanisms behind psychiatric disorders. According to CNN on August 19, 2026, the program has been running for three years, with main research conducted at Stanford Hospital on the same floor as the hospital's epilepsy monitoring unit.
During testing, patients sometimes wear a shower-cap-like array of electrodes for noninvasive recording, while at other times neurosurgeons place and remove deep brain recording electrodes. In both cases, real-time electrical activity from the brain is transmitted via fiber optics and copper wires. Deisseroth described these as "very large data streams, spanning the brain and with sub-millisecond resolution," with round-trip times of less than half a millisecond, enabling closed-loop work for sensing and responding. Research covers conditions including schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism, cancer-induced depression, epilepsy, chronic pain, dissociative disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Deisseroth highlighted the program's key innovation as "getting results with millisecond precision," emphasizing it as a crucial step in understanding complex psychiatric symptoms. The program has already yielded initial results: a study published in Science in May 2025 found that humans and mice share persistent brain-activity patterns in response to a mildly adverse sensory experience (such as an eye puff test).