A New Look At Brain Control

one_neuron_two_neuron writes "Researchers at Harvard have taken a new look at how electricity can make neurons fire in the brain. The scientists found some surprising things: if you stick an electrode in the brain and apply current, you don't just make a small group of neurons fire — many neurons fire a long way away from the electrode. That's probably because instead of activating the cell bodies of the neurons, their axons fire. Those axons are the wiring of the brain. Your cerebral cortex is something like a big pile of unwound yo-yos — if you stick an electrode into the cortex, you're much more likely to hit the strings (the axons), and the yo-yo connected to the string can be really far away. So, how will you ever hook up a computer to your brain? This data shows that we need to rethink how to do that with electrical current. If you stick an electrode in one place, neurons in a totally different place will fire. New optogenetic methods (e.g. using viral delivery of proteins) might work. Or possibly we will figure out how to make the brain learn to interpret these sparse, widespread electrical patterns. New optical techniques have made a dramatic impact on neuroscience recently, and this study uses pulsed-laser-scanning microscopy (two-photon microscopy) to take pictures of neurons deep inside the living brain. The academic paper (PDF) is available on the author's site."

Re:Computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

the mouse.

dildo.

anal beads.

nasal spray containers.

gerbil.

Re:Computers?

[ozydingo]

If you want to get as specific as neural stimulation, then cochlear implants, depending on how common you mean. But I'm glad to be in a world that has that technology. It's also very highly analogous and can benefit from the same research, as it involves direct electrical stimulation to a population of neurons. One of the limiting factors in cochlear implants' success is that it is currently (no pun intended) impossible to stimulate anything close to a narrow, precise range of auditory neurons; thus frequency resolution in CI users suffers dramatically. We have something like 30,000 auditory neurons along on almost continuum of frequencies; studies tend to show that with a CI you can have up to a maximum of 8 separate frequency channels before performance saturates.

Re:Take It Back To Dr. Reid

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Dr. Reid know this was posted here?

Do you know that this was published in Neuron?

Neuron. 2009 Aug 27;63(4):508-22.