(Medical Xpress)—Animals experiments primarily serve two main functions. They give us insight into how biological systems might work, and they also act as test beds for treatments and devices we want to use on ourselves. In neuroscience, particularly with regard to large scale recordings, what we are ultimately interested in is correlating activity maps with thoughts. Cutting to the chase, the thoughts we really care about are not those of animals, or even so much those of other people, but actually the thoughts we generate ourselves. If we are to help a paraplegic do much more than kickoff the World Cup using an electrode pincushion-controlled exoskeleton, we can't simply infer some else's thoughts to generate algorithms for a machine, rather, we must first be able to infer our own.
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