Operant conditioning of cortical waves through a brain-machine interface

At the surface of the cerebral cortex, the dynamics of brain activity at the mesoscopic scale are characterized by waves of synchronized neuronal activity. These waves have been shown to impact the processing of sensory information, but can they be actively shaped by the subject in a goal directed manner? To address this question, we designed a fast widefield optical brain-machine interface for mice that can detect and reinforce individual traveling waves, which follow a specific displacement at the surface of the somatosensory cortex. Trained mice learned to generate these Conditioned Waves, which became progressively more stereotyped. The Conditioned Waves resulted from a reshaping of the cortical activity associated with limb movements, which included a sharp pre-movement cortical suppression that emerged with learning. Our work demonstrates that traveling cortical waves of neuronal activity can be subject to operant control. It provides evidence for the plasticity and functional relevance of large-scale cortical dynamics, and establishes a new paradigm for manipulating mesoscale brain activity.