Volitional activation of remote place representations with a hippocampal brain-machine interface

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lai, Chongxi; Tanaka, Shinsuke; Harris, Timothy D.; Lee, Albert K.
• 署名单位: Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Harvard University; Harvard University Medical Affiliates; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-13104
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adh5206
• 发表日期: 2023-11-03
• 页码: 566-573
• 关键词: awake replay; cell sequences; memory; FUTURE; neurons; time; imagination; ensembles; DYNAMICS; imagery

摘要

The hippocampus is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is believed to involve voluntarily drawing from hippocampal memory representations of people, events, and places, including maplike representations of familiar environments. However, whether representations in such cognitive maps can be volitionally accessed is unknown. We developed a brain-machine interface to test whether rats can do so by controlling their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, and model-based manner. We found 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 provides insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation and planning, and imagination and opens up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics that use hippocampal representations.