Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain

Abstract

Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to acquire visual knowledge, through the direct sculpting of activity patterns in the human brain that mirror those expected to arise through learning. We used neurofeedback from closed-loop real-time functional MRI to create new categories of visual objects in the brain, without the participants' explicit awareness. After neural sculpting, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the learned, but not for the control categories. The ability to sculpt new perceptual distinctions into the human brain offers a noninvasive research paradigm for causal testing of the link between neural representations and behavior. As such, beyond its current application to perception, our work potentially has broad relevance for advancing understanding in other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control.