A new BCI paradigm based on biological brain - digital twin brain dialogue

Brain-computer interface (BCI) establishes a bidirectional pathway between the brain and external devices. Its applications fall into two main categories: utilizing the brain as a controller (e.g., for prosthetics) or as a modulation target (e.g., for cognitive regulation). Progress in BCI is constrained by two core bottlenecks: in brain control, limited understanding of neural coding mechanisms restricts improvements in the accuracy and robustness of encoding/decoding algorithms; in brain regulation, one-size-fits-all regulatory strategies struggle to address significant individual variability, resulting in heterogeneous therapeutic responses. Inspired by neuroscience advances, this perspective proposes a new biological brain - digital twin brain based BCI (BDBCI) paradigm. Here, the biological brain acts as an empirical anchor and ultimate validation platform, while a high-fidelity digital twin brain (DTB) serves as a theoretical inference engine and virtual testbed. Specifically, experimental induction is applied to the biological brain to distill preliminary conclusions, such as brain-behavior mappings and brain-stimulation causal relationships, which are then used to construct and calibrate the DTB model. Subsequently, on the DTB platform, large-scale model deduction is conducted to validate and deepen these preliminary insights mechanistically, thereby optimizing control/regulation parameters or informing the parameter ranges for the next round of experimental induction and model deduction. Through this BDBCI paradigm, we aim to advance BCI research from empirical trial-and-error toward a new era of model-driven, predictable, and explainable precision science.