Three MCB postdocs Alan Mardinly, Nicolas Pégard, and Ian Oldenburg are first authors of a paper published today in Nature Neuroscience along with Stephen Brohawn, Hillel Adesnik, Laura Waller and other researchers. They have devised a holographic brain modulator capable of stimulating single neurons and copying real patterns of brain activity to fool the brain into thinking it has felt, seen, or sensed something. They hope to develop a miniaturized device that could be used as a neural prosthetic replacing lost sensations after degenerative disease or injury, allowing the blind to see, or the paralyzed to feel touch.

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