Decoded connectivity neurofeedback for biomarker and intervention of psychiatric disorders

One of the most important assumptions in neuroscience and brain science is that neural activity in the brain is the cause of our mind including consciousness. Most studies of human learning/memory/cognition have concentrated on examining correlations between behavioral and neural activity changes rather than establishing cause-and-effect relationships. Even for animal studies, the most frequently used technique is examining temporal correlation between neural activities and some hypothetical computational variables proposed by experimenters. The lack of experimental tools examining cause and effect relationships in the systems neuroscience severely constrains its progress and applicability to practical problems. To fill this gap between major concepts and current technology, by applying a novel online-feedback method utilizing decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, we developed a new technique to manipulate neural codes [1], DecNef.