Paul Nuyujukian

But I believe that in order to advance brain disease treatment, right, to develop the most sophisticated brain machine interfaces, we got to get into the stands with the microphone to hear those individual conversations between neurons.

Well, we do it with these tiny little wires that are implanted surgically into the brain.

These little wires called electrodes measure the individual voltage changes that one neuron signals to another.

The little digital event that says, I've got something to say.

That's one millisecond.

So we can now study how our animals perform reaching tasks simultaneously with measuring their brain activity.

So we can see both the way their arm moves as well as what is happening in their brain when their arm moves.

And so we give them these little tasks to perform where they got to like move their hand to chase a little green dot on the screen and they get it and they get a little drop of juice.

That's like video games for monkeys.

It's really fun.

So we make very small, nearly invisible lines.

injuries into the brain right where the electrodes are, which had previously never been possible.

That lets us study the immediate impact of a very small number of neurons being lost, which is

invisible from a behavioral standpoint to the monkeys.

They don't feel this.

They don't see any deficits.

They go about moving just fine.

But because they're performing these very practiced, careful behaviors on these reaching tasks that we give them in our lab environments, we can see very small changes in their reaching behaviors.

And with this model, we're now able to ask the question, how does the brain change and how does it recover when something like a stroke occurs?

Right.