Eberhard Fetz

I received my Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1967 and came to UW as a postdoc. My overall research has concerned the neural control of limb movement in primates and mechanisms of neural computation. Our initial studies concerned monkeys’ ability to volitionally control the activity of cortical cells. In this operant conditioning paradigm monkeys drove a biofeedback meter arm to reinforcement threshold with various patterns of neural activity, a precursor of current brain-machine interfaces. We documented the correlational linkages and response properties of premotorneuronal cells in motor cortex and spinal cord. Our lab pioneered the recording of spinal interneurons in behaving monkeys and showed that spinal neurons share many properties of cortical cells, including preparatory activity prior to instructed movements. We investigated the synaptic interactions between cortical neurons with in vivo intracellular recordings and spike-triggered averages of membrane potentials. We used dynamic recurrent neural network models to elucidate mechanisms of neural computation. More recently we developed a head-fixed bidirectional brain-computer interface that records activity of cortical neurons during free behavior and converts this activity in real time to stimulation of cortex, spinal cord, or intracranial reward sites. Other interests include artistic ways to represent the operations of the brain.