Stanford Team Records Psychiatric Brain Circuits at Millisecond Precision
A Stanford program is recording brain activity in psychiatric inpatients at millisecond precision, combining noninvasive electrode arrays with deep brain recording electrodes to trace the circuits behind schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism and cancer-induced depression. The Human Neural Circuitry program, led by neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, has run for three years and moves data over fiber-optic and copper links fast enough for round trips of under half a millisecond, allowing the system to sense and respond in a closed loop. Deisseroth said the key innovation is getting results at millisecond precision, which he called a crucial step toward understanding complex psychiatric symptoms.