PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Marius Cătălin Iordan
AU  - Victoria J. H. Ritvo
AU  - Kenneth A. Norman
AU  - Nicholas B. Turk-Browne
AU  - Jonathan D. Cohen
TI  - Sculpting New Visual Concepts into the Human Brain
AID  - 10.1101/2020.10.14.339853
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.10.14.339853
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.10.14.339853.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.10.14.339853.full
AB  - Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report a new way of acquiring conceptual knowledge by directly sculpting activity patterns in the human brain. We used a non-invasive technique (closed-loop real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging) to create novel categories of visual objects in the brain. After training, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the sculpted, but not control categories. The ability to sculpt new conceptual distinctions in the human brain, applied here to perception, has broad relevance to other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control. As such, the work opens up new frontiers in brain-machine interface design, neuroprosthetics, and neurorehabilitation.One Sentence Summary Sculpting new visual categories in the brain with neurofeedback restructured subjective experience and neural processing.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.