AI helps scientists understand brain activity behind thoughts

Xaq Pitkow - A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University has developed artificial intelligence models that help them better understand the brain computations that underlie thoughts. This is new, because until now there has been no method to measure thoughts. The researchers first developed a new model that can estimate thoughts by evaluating behavior, and then tested their model on a trained artificial brain where they found neural activity associated with those estimates of thoughts. The theoretical study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "For centuries, neuroscientists have studied how the brain works by relating brain activity to inputs and outputs,” said corresponding author Xaq Pitkow , assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor and of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. "For instance, when studying the neuroscience of movement, scientists measure muscle movements as well as neuronal activity and then relate those two measurements. To study cognition in the brain, however, we don't have anything to compare the measured neural activity to.