The Allen Institute’s OpenScope program lets scientists study the weird workings of the brain — for instance, how magic mushrooms work their psychedelic magic on individual neurons, how memories of the past influence perceptions of the present, and how the brain’s visual system interprets motion and texture.
But one of the program’s leaders, neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq, says he’s really excited about an experiment that hasn’t yet been fully defined. It’s a study that could support a theory about the mechanism by which sensory data is fed into our consciousness — to modify our view of the world, and perhaps to modify our behavior as well.