Improved Mental Function

A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota and Massachusetts General Hospital has published results from a pilot human study showing that brain functions related to self-control and mental flexibility can be improved with targeted electrical brain stimulation and artificial intelligence. MSI PI Alik Widge (assistant professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) is the senior author of this study, which was published recently in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering (Basu, I., Yousefi, A., Crocker, B. et al. Closed-loop enhancement and neural decoding of cognitive control in humans. Nat Biomed Eng (2021). doi: 10.1038/s41551-021-00804-y). The study showed that using targeted electrical brain stimulation in a specific brain region improved mental function. These findings could be used in the development of improved treatments for mental illness. A story about the research can be found on the University of Minnesota News site: Researchers Boost Human Mental Function With Brain Stimulation.

Professor Widge uses MSI hardware and software resources to perform analyses of datasets resulting from electrophysiologic studies of decision-making brain networks.