Traditional electrical stimulation of brain tissue typically affects relatively large volumes of tissue spanning multiple millimeters. This low spatial resolution stimulation results in nonspecific functional effects. In addition, a primary shortcoming of these designs was the failure to take advantage of inherent functional organization in the cerebral cortex. Here, we describe a new method to electrically stimulate the brain which achieves selective targeting of single feature-specific domains in visual cortex. We provide evidence that this paradigm achieves mesoscale, functional network-specificity, and intensity dependence in a way that mimics visual stimulation. Application of this approach to known feature domains (such as color, orientation, motion, and depth) in visual cortex may lead to important functional improvements in the specificity and sophistication of brain stimulation methods and has implications for visual cortical prosthetic design.

中文翻译：

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皮层功能网络的焦点电刺激。

脑组织的传统电刺激通常会影响跨越数毫米的相对大量的组织。这种低空间分辨率刺激会导致非特异性功能影响。此外，这些设计的一个主要缺点是未能利用大脑皮层固有的功能组织。在这里，我们描述了一种电刺激大脑的新方法，该方法实现了视觉皮层中单个特征特定域的选择性靶向。我们提供的证据表明，这种范式以模拟视觉刺激的方式实现了中尺度、功能网络特异性和强度依赖性。将此方法应用于已知特征域（如颜色、方向、运动、