Time: 10:00-11:00 on Tue.,April.11 2023

Venue：E109, Biomedicine Hall

Speaker: Dr.Chongxi Lai

Host: Dr.Xinyu Zhao

Title:  Mental navigation and telekinesis with a hippocampal map-based brain-machine interface

Abstract：

The hippocampus is a brain area that is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is thought to involve the voluntary generation of specific hippocampal neural activity patterns related to remote places and events. However, whether animals can volitionally control their hippocampal activity in this manner is unknown. We developed a brain-machine interface to test if rats could control their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, model-based manner. We show that rats can efficiently navigate or direct objects to arbitrary goal locations within a virtual reality arena solely by activating and sustaining appropriate hippocampal representations of remote places. This should provide insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation/planning, and imagination, and open up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics utilizing hippocampal representations.

Biography：

Dr. Chongxi Lai has an extensive background in the electronics industry. He then pursued his Ph.D. degree in neuroscience through a joint program with Janelia Research Campus (HHMI) and University of Cambridge. During his Ph.D. research, he developed a real-time spike sorting system for brain-machine interface applications. Following the completion of his Ph.D. degree, Dr. Lai continued to work as a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Albert Lee lab at Janelia, where he conducted highly innovative research on mental navigation in animals.