Some of the more exciting recent developments in neuroscience have been in developing electrical interfaces to the central nervous system, for example, using electrical stimulation to treat neurological disease as well as current attempts to use recordings from chronically implanted electrodes to control robotic and prosthetic devices. A key question has been how well people can learn to control neural responses, both field potentials and single unit activity, and how these can be used to control external devices.
We have an extraordinary opportunity to directly record single-unit neural responses from the medial temporal lobe of awake human patients (who have electrodes implanted for clinical monitoring prior to surgery for otherwise intractable epilepsy).
In this work we are studying how changes in attention modify neural responses in the human brain, as well as how these responses may be manipulated by the will of the human subject.