Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI)

A recent article in the NY Times highlights the research of Dr. Jack Gallant at UC Berkeley, who was among the first who applied computational approaches to decoding the visual images that a subject was viewing from functional MRI data. Gallant received his Ph.D. in 1986 from Yale’s Psychology department. This research provides hope to many individuals who have suffered disease or trauma and have lost their ability to move their limbs or speak. In each of these realms, BCIs have shown promise as intentions expressed in neural activity can be read by computers which then control complex robotic arms and speech synthesizers. However, this work also raises serious ethical concerns if reading neural activity provides others with information an individual does not want to share. Many tech companies such as Google and Facebook and Elon Musk’s NeuraLink are investing in such technology, which has prompted an urgent examination of the ethics of mind reading.

Recent research has focused attention on microglia, a type of glial cell that is associated with the immune system, and which is normally activated by infection or damage to the brain. Recent research has shown that microglia also act as synaptic strippers and in a 2020 paper in Science, Wang and colleagues showed that microglia can remove connections between hippocampal neurons that are responsible for particular memories. This suggests that microglia play an important role in forgetting.