Post

⚡ A brain implant delivers a microsecond pulse to cortex, and the textbook answer is that the neuron fires. The biology turns out to be far richer, which matters for every patient feeling through a prosthetic hand, suppressing a seizure, or treating depression by stimulation.

🔬 Our Nature Biomedical Engineering paper builds the first unified mechanistic framework for how intracortical microstimulation creates artificial sensation, synthesizing rodent, primate, and human evidence to trace the chain from pulse to perception.

🧠 Three mechanisms from this series converge in primate and human data, inhibitory recruitment at certain frequencies (Post 7), metabolic depletion that bounds percept duration (Post 5), and neurovascular disruption gating repeat-session capacity (Posts 13-14).

📊 The biology is conserved across species. Inhibitory recruitment, metabolic fatigue, and frequency-dependent microglial activation (Post 15) appear from mouse to human cortex, evidence the mouse model did not lie about how the human brain answers an electrode.

🤔 BCI users report sensations that fade during sustained use and vary across sessions, which the framework explains not as neural adaptation alone but as metabolic depletion, vascular compromise, and immune remodeling on different timescales around the same electrode.