How thinking can alter perception - Nature News 27.10.2010

On Nature online a news article reports about research by Cerf, M. et al. Nature 467, 1104-1108 (2010) which shows how humans can use thinking to alter perception of competing visual images

• Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101027/full/news.2010.568.html

In the news Dr. Moran Cerf gives an interesting interpretation of his EXPERIMENTS:

• "The environment offers some reality," he says, "but your own brain can shape it and override it with its internal deliberations." 
  

The THEORY for this has been developed in the last 40 years within the theory of knowing called Radical Constructivism http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/ 

On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons

Moran Cerf^1,2,3, Nikhil Thiruvengadam^1,4, Florian Mormann^1,5, Alexander Kraskov¹, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga^1,6, Christof Koch^1,7,11 & Itzhak Fried^2,8,9,10,11

1. Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
2. Department of Neurosurgery, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
3. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, New York 10012, USA
4. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA
5. Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, Bonn 53105, Germany
6. Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
7. Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, 136-713, Korea
8. Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
9. Functional Neurosurgery Unit, Tel-Aviv Medical Center, Tel-Aviv 64239, Israel
10. Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel
11. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Correspondence to: Florian Mormann^1,5 Email: moran@klab.caltech.edu

Correspondence to: Christof Koch^1,7,11 Email: koch@klab.caltech.edu

Correspondence to: Itzhak Fried^2,8,9,10,11 Email: ifried@mednet.ucla.edu

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Abstract

Daily life continually confronts us with an exuberance of external, sensory stimuli competing with a rich stream of internal deliberations, plans and ruminations. The brain must select one or more of these for further processing. How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention regulate this competition^{1, 2, 3, 4}. Recording from single neurons in patients implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9}, here we demonstrate that humans can regulate the activity of their neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) to alter the outcome of the contest between external images and their internal representation. Subjects looked at a hybrid superposition of two images representing familiar individuals, landmarks, objects or animals and had to enhance one image at the expense of the other, competing one. Simultaneously, the spiking activity of their MTL neurons in different subregions and hemispheres was decoded in real time to control the content of the hybrid. Subjects reliably regulated, often on the first trial, the firing rate of their neurons, increasing the rate of some while simultaneously decreasing the rate of others. They did so by focusing onto one image, which gradually became clearer on the computer screen in front of their eyes, and thereby overriding sensory input. On the basis of the firing of these MTL neurons, the dynamics of the competition between visual images in the subject’s mind was visualized on an external display.