Closed-Loop in Neuroscience: Can a Brain be Controlled?

An experimental setup capable of stimulating, inhibiting, sensing, processing and analyzing a biological system is presented. The experimental setup is based on open-source, open hardware commercial devices. It can be applied to record and control neuronal activity, for example to establish causal links between neurons and behavior in a closed-loop fashion. Cells or group of cells can be triggered by acoustical, electrical or light impulses. This last case is based on a technique defined as optogenetics. The latter is used in an example that reads and controls neuronal activity of a population of neurons in laboratory rats forcing them to transition between neuronal states, illustrates the system developed in this work.