Intracortical Brain-Machine Interfaces Advance Sensorimotor Neuroscience

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) decode brain activity to control external devices. Over the past two decades, the BMI community has grown tremendously and reached some impressive milestones, including the first human clinical trials using chronically implanted intracortical electrodes. It has also contributed experimental paradigms and important findings to basic neuroscience. In this review, we discuss neuroscience achievements stemming from BMI research, specifically that based upon upper limb prosthetic control with intracortical microelectrodes. We will focus on three main areas: first, we discuss progress in neural coding of reaches in motor cortex, describing recent results linking high dimensional representations of cortical activity to muscle activation. Next, we describe recent findings on learning and plasticity in motor cortex on various time scales. Finally, we discuss how bidirectional BMIs have led to better understanding of somatosensation in and related to motor cortex.