Reconfiguring motor circuits for a joint manual and BCI task

Designing brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can be used in conjunction with ongoing motor behavior requires an understanding of how neural activity co-opted for brain-control interacts with existing neural circuits. BCIs may be used to regain lost motor function after stroke or traumatic brain injury, for instance, provided that a neural control signal can be extracted from a single spared hemisphere. Such an approach, however, requires that neural activity controlling the unaffected limb is dissociated from activity controlling the BCI. In this study we investigate how primary motor cortex accomplishes simultaneous BCI control and motor control in a task that explicitly requires both activities to be driven from the same brain region (i.e. a ‘dual control task’). Single unit activity was recorded from intracortical multi-electrode arrays while a non-human primate performed this dual-control BCI task. We observe broad changes in tuning of both units used to drive the BCI directly (‘control units’) and units that do not directly control the BCI (‘non-control units’). Using transfer entropy, a measure of effective connectivity, we observe control-unit-specific dissociation from other units. Through an analysis of variance we find that the intrinsic variability of the control units has a significant effect on task proficiency. In particular, at least one control unit must have a high intrinsic variability to allow cursor control and target acquisition. Surprisingly, the degree of co-tuning or connectivity with other units did not affect dual-control task proficiency. Thus, motor cortical activity is flexible enough to perform novel BCI tasks that require active decoupling of natural associations to wrist motion.