Cortical crosstalk

A few years earlier, neuroscientists Michael Goldberg and James Bisley of Columbia University in New York had found that the parietal cortex was involved in both top-down and bottom-up processing,¹ “but we didn’t know which way [the signal] was going,” says Bisley, who currently works at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. The 2007 study was the first to demonstrate such directionality in attention-related behavior.

While Miller wasn’t the first to record from multiple areas in the primate brain simultaneously, he “really pushed the envelope” with regard to the number of electrodes, says neuroscientist Bob Desimone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “[Using] multiple electrodes [to] record from different [primate] brain regions made this study a major step forward,” agrees neuroscientist John Duncan of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) in England.

Since the publication of this month’s Hot Paper, the use of multielectrode recording has spread like wildfire through the primate neuroscience community. “It certainly started something that I think has been very good for the field,” Bisley says. “I wouldn’t call [the technique] common, but I think everyone is trying to get going in that direction.”

Scientists are now using multielectrode approaches to tackle a wide range of complex topics, including attention, coordination, and decision making. “There are hardly any primate labs that aren’t playing around with multielectrode recording in some way,” says Desimone.

The use of multiple electrodes in different regions of the mammalian brain began in the mid-1990s, when researchers employed the technique to shed light on the precise relationships between groups of neurons.

In 1995, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University Medical Center permanently implanted dozens of hair-like electrodes—known as microwires—to concurrently record from five different brain areas of rats. He identified predictable cycles of synchronized activity during tactile stimulation and just before the rats’ whiskers started exploring their environment.²

In 1998, Nicolelis used his microwires to record from three different cortical regions of owl monkeys, all of which showed nearly simultaneous activation upon tactile stimulation.³ Starting in 2001, Desimone and his colleagues published a series of studies in which they used multiple, movable electrodes to record neuronal activity within the visual areas of macaques.⁴ All of this laid the foundation for Buschman and Miller’s 2007 paper, and a concurrent study by neuroscientist Trichur Vidyasagar of the University of Melbourne.⁵

Other neuroscientists have since used Buschman and Miller’s technique to further explore how different brain regions work together to coordinate behavior. In 2008, neuroscientist Bijan Pesaran of New York University and colleagues recorded the frontal and parietal cortices in rhesus macaques and learned that the two areas were more in sync when monkeys had freedom to make their own choices versus when they had to follow instructions, suggesting these areas may be part of a “decision circuit.”⁶ In May of this year, Desimone’s group found that the frontal eye fields—an area believed to respond to visual stimuli—and the V4 area of the visual cortex showed a similar pattern of activity when a monkey was presented with colored dots on a screen. This finding suggests that communication between these two areas may play a role in attention.⁷ Most recently, Buschman and Miller published a study demonstrating that coordinated activity within the frontal eye fields may help regulate when monkeys shift their attention while performing difficult search tasks.⁸ Scientists have also begun to use multielectrode techniques to understand the intricate neural signals necessary for controlling prosthetic limbs.

“It’s pretty clear that a lot of labs are very excited about the potential that [multiple electrodes] have,” Pesaran says. Multielectrode recording is “the tool of the future,” Nicolelis agrees. “In a few more years, we’ll be able to record [30,000] or 40,000 cells [simultaneously].”