(60% of your grade) Imagine you are a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the people that brought you the internet and then some)-sponsored scientist who wants to “write-in” visual percepts in a (monkey) subject’s brain, by directly stimulating neurons along the ventral visual stream (this is not total sci-fi, but was actually the goal of the Neovision program a few years ago, and is being actively pursued by a number of groups). How would you go about inducing the percept of, say, my face, by stimulating a) cells in the retina (which cells to stimulate? why? how?), b) cells in inferotemporal cortex (which ones? why? how?)?Use your knowledge of neurons’ receptive fields, preferred stimuli/features/objects at the different stages of the pathway, and anatomy. Provided information available from readings (files attached).
(40%) in the lecture, linked below, I provided some examples of how computational neuroscience can be used to inform approaches to augment cognitive function. What ethical issues do you see arising from this work?
Link: https://georgetown.zoom.us/rec/play/BDIHpEjirIY0zyyuj6wkA8W2JLtPV4K6SZAqY2icAshRVDWNYkcmTHBRaZhNhCLkCDA0ru314z9S_7Du.WT0V2_p_Maqju-Xj?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=sIIxsgHiTlyFhFSkNpFImw.1635940455675.22cebdb41c58810bd9ffd44e6e7bd096&_x_zm_rhtaid=500
