Sculpting New Visual Categories into the Human Brain

Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report a proof-of-concept for a new way for humans to acquire visual knowledge by directly sculpting activity patterns in the human brain that mirror those expected to arise through learning. We used a non-invasive technique (closed-loop real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback) to create new categories of visual objects in the brain, without the participants' explicit awareness. After neural sculpting, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the sculpted, but not for the control categories. The ability to sculpt new perceptual distinctions in the human brain offers a new paradigm for human fMRI research that allows for non-invasive, causal testing of the link between neural representations and behavior. As such, beyond its current application to perception, our work potentially has broad relevance to other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.