Paul Nuyujukian, et al, introduce the Human Neural Circuitry program
The program uses a high-powered data-gathering infrastructure to process and study brain activity in real time.
In November 2023, Professor Karl Deisseroth, MD introduced the Human Neural Circuitry program. It is a unique Stanford Medicine collaboration, years in the making that was spawned by key research he and collaborators Vivek Buch, Carolyn Rodriguez, and Paul Nuyujukian unearthed just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Human Neural Circuitry program seeks to investigate the deepest mysteries of brain function, and dysfunction. The program is housed in Stanford Hospital, and allows for the highest level of research science to be conducted with patients who have conditions ranging from epilepsy to obsessive compulsive disorder to depression.
“The problem with treating brain diseases has been that we have no way of measuring them,” states Paul. “This fundamentally changes that because we’ve built the framework to support that measurement.”
That change begins with data flow. No expense has been spared for the outlay of fiber-optic and copper cable needed to conduct massive streams of data quickly and securely across all the HNC-wired rooms.
“It goes from this room to a server farm across campus in Forsythe Hall. Closed-loop time from here in the patient’s head to Forsythe and back: less than half a millisecond,” states Deisseroth.
While most human brains can’t readily picture how fast that is, Paul confirms the firepower of the network is where the magic of unearthing the most unexplained cognitive phenomena exists.
“The bandwidth of this clinical research network, in hundreds of gigabtyes-per-second, is astonishing,” continues Paul. “I’m pretty sure this is by far the fastest dedicated research network in a clinical setting ever constructed. It will allow us to tease out what a region of the brain is actually doing in a manner that can’t be measured any other way."
“With the HNC program, we will understand what happens in the minds of people when they are initiating actions, making decisions, recalling memories and experiencing emotions — at a scale never before measured,”
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