Methods · Lobeworks/17

Every method in Lobeworks/17, filterable by its attributes.

- Brain-computer interface: A brain-computer interface (BCI) records activity from the brain and turns it, in real time, into an action outside the body, such as moving a cursor, typing, speaking through a synthesiser or moving a robotic arm, and today its main use is giving back communication and control to people who are paralysed. - Calcium imaging: Calcium imaging watches neurons fire by filming a fluorescent protein that lights up when calcium enters the cell, and it is the standard way to record thousands of identified neurons at once in a living animal. - Connectome: A connectome is the complete wiring diagram of a nervous system or a piece of one, every neuron and every synapse between them, and it is made by cutting preserved tissue into thousands of thin sections, imaging each with an electron microscope and tracing every cell through the stack. - EEG: EEG (electroencephalography) records the brain's electrical activity through electrodes on the scalp, and it is the cheapest, most portable way to follow the brain in real time, used to diagnose epilepsy, stage sleep and drive simple brain-computer interfaces. - Electrocorticography: Electrocorticography (ECoG) records the brain's electrical activity from electrodes laid directly on the surface of the cortex, under the skull, and it is used mainly to find the exact origin of seizures before epilepsy surgery and, increasingly, as the signal for brain-computer interfaces that decode speech or movemen - Encoding model: An encoding model predicts the activity recorded from a brain, voxel by voxel or electrode by electrode, from a description of the stimulus the person is receiving, and it is the standard way neuroscience tests a theory of what a region represents: the better it predicts activity for stimuli it never saw, the better th - Epilepsy surgery: Epilepsy surgery removes, destroys or disconnects the part of the brain where seizures start, and it is the treatment most likely to stop seizures altogether in a person whose focal epilepsy has resisted medication. - FMRI: fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) maps brain activity across the whole head by detecting the changes in blood oxygen that follow it, and it is the method that made it possible to see, without surgery, which areas of a healthy brain work during a task. - FNIRS: fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) measures brain activity by shining near-infrared light into the head and reading how much returns, and it is the most portable way to follow blood oxygen in the cortex, used in infants, in moving people and outside the lab. - Functional ultrasound: Functional ultrasound images brain activity by measuring how much blood flows through the smallest vessels of each spot of tissue, and it offers fMRI-like maps at much finer resolution from a device the size of a hand, provided the skull is out of the way. - Information transfer rate: The information transfer rate is the number of bits a brain-computer interface delivers per selection or per minute, computed from how many options the user chooses among, how often the choice is right and how long each choice takes, and it is the figure used to compare interfaces that work in different ways: a speller - Intracortical microstimulation: Intracortical microstimulation is the technique of writing information into the brain by passing tiny currents through electrodes inserted into the cortex, and in people it is how a brain-computer interface returns a sense of touch from a robotic hand. - Light-sheet microscopy: Light-sheet microscopy lights a sample from the side with a thin sheet of light and films the fluorescence of that one plane with a camera set at right angles, and on brains made transparent by clearing it records a whole organ, plane after plane, at the scale of single cells. - MEG: MEG (magnetoencephalography) records the tiny magnetic fields that the brain's electrical currents produce outside the head, and it is used to map where and when activity happens with millisecond timing, most often to locate the source of epileptic activity before surgery. - Microwave tomography: Microwave tomography sends low-power microwaves through the head from a ring of antennas and reconstructs a map of how the tissue inside slows and absorbs them, and its main use is to tell a bleed from a clot in a suspected stroke with equipment that fits in an ambulance. - Molecular recording: Molecular recording makes each cell write a record of its own activity into molecules inside it, to be read out later, and it is a proposed way around the wiring, bandwidth and depth limits of every method that reads the brain from outside the cell. - Neural decoder: A neural decoder is the model inside a brain-computer interface that takes recorded activity, usually spike counts from a few hundred electrodes in bins of a few tens of milliseconds, and returns what the user intends: a cursor velocity, a click, a phoneme or a word. - Optogenetics: Optogenetics makes chosen neurons respond to light by giving them a light-sensitive ion channel from algae or microbes, and it is the main tool for testing what a given set of neurons does: switch them on or off with millisecond precision and watch what changes. - Stereo-EEG: Stereo-EEG records the brain's electrical activity from thin electrodes pushed through small holes in the skull into deep structures, and it is used to find where seizures start when the evidence for epilepsy surgery does not agree on a single place. - Surface electromyography: Surface electromyography (sEMG) records the electrical activity of muscles through electrodes on the skin, and since a muscle fires only when its motor neurons command it, a band around the wrist can read the motor commands for the fingers without touching the brain.