Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute

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.

Two people with tetraplegia typed on a virtual two-handed QWERTY keyboard simply by attempting finger movements, which electrodes implanted in the brain decoded into keystrokes. Typing speed was set by the users and reached 110 characters per minute, or 22 words per minute, with a word error rate of 1.6%, which the authors say resembles able-bodied typing accuracy. Accurate decoding required as few as 30 calibration sentences, and a 5-gram language model improved sentence output. One participant has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and the other a spinal cord injury.