Plasticity of motor cortical preferred directions

描述(申请人提供)：神经元“编码”世界的各个方面的发现是我们理解大脑功能的基础；神经编码是可塑性的这一发现是几乎同等大小的基本原理。使用传统方法诱导学习并检查大脑由此产生的变化，收集到的关于功能可塑性的机制和意义的信息量是有限的。使用运动神经假体范式，可以控制一组细胞的放电活动的功能后果；因此，可以直接改变映射，从细胞子集的尖峰活动到它对外部世界的影响。拟议的实验将解决以下问题：1)运动皮质可以在多大程度上补偿其神经元子集的活动与其活动对外部世界的影响之间的映射变化？2)当施加不同数量的变化时，是否使用不同的补偿策略？3)大脑在改变映射发生变化的特定细胞的放电关联时有多大的选择性？对这些问题的研究将以一种传统方法不可能实现的方式，揭示系统层面的可塑性机制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The finding that neurons "encode" various facets of the world was fundamental to our understanding of brain function; the finding that neural coding is plastic is a fundamental principal of nearly equal magnitude. There is a limit to the amount of information that can be gleaned about the mechanisms and meaning of functional plasticity using traditional methods that induce learning and examine the resulting changes in the brain. Using the motor neural prosthetics paradigm, it is possible to control the functional consequence of the firing activity of a group of cells; thus, it is possible to directly change the mapping from the spiking activity of a subset of cells to its effects on the external world. The proposed experiments would address the following questions: 1) To what extent can the motor cortex compensate for changes in the mapping between the activity of a subset of its neurons and the consequences of its activity on the external world? 2) Are different compensation strategies used when different amounts of change are imposed? 3) How selective is the brain in changing the firing correlates of the particular cells whose mapping was changed? A investigation of these issues will reveal insights about the system-level mechanisms of plasticity in a way not possible with traditional methods.