The Automatic Neuroscientist

We've learned this week that computers can play Go. But at least there's one human activity they will never master: neuroscience. A computer will never be a neuroscientist. Except... hang on. A new paper just out in Neuroimage describes something called The Automatic Neuroscientist. Oh. So what is this new neuro-robot? According to its inventors, Romy Lorenz and colleagues of Imperial College London, it's a framework for using "real-time fMRI in combination with modern machine-learning techniques to automatically design the optimal experiment to evoke a desired target brain state." It works like this. You put someone in an MRI scanner and start an fMRI sequence to record their brain activity. The Automatic Neuroscientist (TAN) shows them a series of different stimuli (e.g. images or sounds) and measures the neural responses. It then learns which stimuli activate different parts of the brain, and works out the best stimuli in order to elicit a particular target pattern of brain activity (which is specified at the outset.) This is not an entirely new idea as Lorenz et al. acknowledge, but they say that theirs is the first general framework.