PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chongxi Lai
AU  - Shinsuke Tanaka
AU  - Timothy D. Harris
AU  - Albert K. Lee
TI  - Mental navigation and telekinesis with a hippocampal map-based brain-machine interface
AID  - 10.1101/2023.04.07.536077
DP  - 2023 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2023.04.07.536077
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/04/10/2023.04.07.536077.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/04/10/2023.04.07.536077.full
AB  - The hippocampus is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is believed to involve voluntarily drawing from hippocampal memory representations of people, events, and places, including the hippocampus’ map-like representations of familiar environments. However, whether the representations in such “cognitive maps” can be volitionally and selectively accessed is unknown. We developed a brain-machine interface to test if rats could control their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, model-based manner. We show that rats can efficiently navigate or direct objects to arbitrary goal locations within a virtual reality arena solely by activating and sustaining appropriate hippocampal representations of remote places. This should provide insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation/planning, and imagination, and open up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics utilizing hippocampal representations.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.