Towards Noninvasive, Beneficial Modulation of Neural Population Activity via Natural Vision Perturbations

Abstract: Precise control of neural activity – modulating target neurons deep in the brain while leaving nearby neurons unaffected – is an outstanding challenge in neuroscience, generally achieved through invasive techniques. In this talk, I will present our recent work that investigates the possibility of precisely and noninvasively modulating neural activity in the high-level primate ventral visual stream via perturbations to ongoing natural visual experience. When tested on Macaque Inferior Temporal (IT) sub-populations, we found quantitative agreement between the model-predicted and biologically realized effect: strong modulation concentrated on targeted neural sites. We extended this to demonstrate accurate injection of experimenter-chosen neural population patterns via perturbations applied to typical natural visual feeds. These results highlight that current machine-executable models of the ventral stream can now design vision-based noninvasive neural interventions at the resolution of individual neurons.