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MIT Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light
An anonymous reader writes "The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity. "Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease."
There are easier ways to shut down brain activity. 4chan comes to mind.
...that this is actually a plan to invent the Neuralizer from Men in Black?
... a scientific reason why we /.ers should not leave the darkness of our parents' basements and our computer monitors, and continue to avoid the dreaded realm known as "outside".
The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity.
Well, I guess that's cheaper than alcohol.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Expect to see a lot of yellow lights at party rallies from now on...
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Considering certain patterns of light, as found in some video games, for example, have the ability to bring about seizures and people the suffer from Epilepsy, it makes sanse that certain patterns of light would also be able to reverse that effect.
Anyone got a light for my sig?
Just gained a new and potentially scarier meaning. What you bet that if this goes anywhere that ADHD is next on the list and the teacher gets a remote control?
It's called Family Vacation Slideshow.
As in the '60s British series - they had lights that pulsed over peoples faces to make them do/forget things...
Finally I can get a pair of tinfoil shades to go with my hat.
otherwise known as a boobtube....
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun had computer monitors could implant an artificial intelligence in anyone who looked at their patterns of swirling colours (as the population in the novels worshipped these artificial intelligences, this was seen as "possession by a god" like in ancient Greek thought). Ironically, this has been called by some critics the most scientifically unbelievable thing in the work, since "looking at patterns of light can't change your brain."
Any of you young'uns old enough to remember the movie Looker?
....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/
Hmmmm,,,
Holy shit! They're two for two-- CGI media models, and now this. Maybe I better go back and watch that movie again....
~
(-by the by, I'd still like to find the soundtrack to this movie, if anyone has run across a copy-)
welcome our new yellow light emitting overlords!
Yet another reason CFLs are better!
Another sexist topic about blonde girls !
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Think of what could happen if that kind of technology is use to make a weapon!
According to the article, the yellow light "silences" neurons that have been engineered to include the halorhodopsin gene found in certain bacteria. The light doesn't have the same effect on the neurons that you'd typically find in your skull.
I'm not sure how this would be used clinically to treat epilepsy. Perhaps by introducing the genes into cells in the affected area using a retrovirus?
As in sunlight?
I think they should take a look outside for once.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Aah, that's why the bright guys seem so stupid at times...
There are quicker ways to shut down the brain.
Playing 'Russian Roulette' with a semi-automatic pistol is one idea.
I don't see the point here. Shutting down light with brain would be more useful. And making it work with TV would be the must !
Maybe they could test this on the politicians in the US to see if it does work.
Actually This might not show as any difference!
Did anyone read TFA? It has nothing to do with light entering the eye and hitting the retina. Forget the strobe lights!
This study is great, because it means we can study animals better. It means researchers will get much more useful information from animal studies (instead of operating on 1000's of rabbits or something, they can do heaps of studies on just one rabbit), which will lead to new and better targets for drug research, better drugs, and perhaps a cure - way down the track.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Think of the applications! Time to get a pair of them tin foil glasses to accompany the hat.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Finally help me get to sleep regularly?!? Please!!
Can't believe you missed the follow up article:
OA (Reuters) - The Guardians of the Universe held a press conference today after scientists in the MIT Media Lab announced that neural activity could be suppressed through the usage of yellow light.
Spokesperson Tom Kalmaku stated, "It's charming to see that the scientists in Sector 2814 have finally caught on to something the rest of the Galaxy has known for the better part of the past three billion years. The Corps have had to deal with the effects of yellow light since it's inception. It's a very powerful frequency in the spectrum and is difficult to counteract."
Oa's Central Power Battery has been vulnerable to the effects of yellow for some time now and the Guardians have no means of defending against it. "In the past, we tried dipping the thing in a thin, transparent blue polymer once but it didn't seem to help any." said Kilowog when prompted on the subject.
MIT is very pleased with the discovery, but currently has no means available to implement this to the benefit of epileptics and Michael J. Fox.
Additionally, an anonymous follower of Dinshah P. Ghadiali's alternative Color Therapy medical techniques was also unimpressed by the news and simply stated, "Colored light? Effect the body? Duh!"
When contacted for comment, Hal Jordan was unavailable.
DO NOT WANT
nothing was seen here, move along..
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
Shining sunlight on my mother-in-law makes her melt into a puddle on the floor...
*ba-dum-tish*
Wait, there's more, take my mother-in-law, please.
Task Mangler
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
I think this is a great achievement. But what about it's misuse%)+!@% NO PULSE
All your neuron are belong to us!
America, Home of the Brave.
So to disable the frikkin sharks with lasers, we just have to reverse the polarity of the flux capacitors?!
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
.......what a man !
Now all we need is a different type of light to activate some people's brains!
Could this explain why when a traffic light turns yellow, nobody seems to notice it?
i can think of one...
TV has been shutting all of our brains down for decades.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I thought Hollywood had invented a way to shut down brains using light (and sound) a long time ago...
After seeing the link on my RSS feed I wondered what MIT had against Brian and why they wanted to shut him down... Just as well I've read the article now
How much do you like toast?
Now I know why all these other guys are driving around like braindead morons in their cars. Maybe I should stop using INDICATOR LIGHTS...
ROFL
So, does this also help explain the strange allure of gold throughout history, and the use of gold for religious ornamentation?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
This is no news to me. The same thing happens when the light at the office hits my eyes every morning. Almost 0 brain activity.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
John Carpenter already demonstrated how to shut down brains with light. You just need a shaky grasp of metaphysics, and a very big bomb...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I thought Kirk shut down this machine already.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
... it's a cue to train elite surgical teams to take a Fantastic Voyage .
So not only would doctors have to get light inside the brain, they'd first have to genetically engineer the neurons to include and express the halorhodopsin gene. The right neurons: the ones that will later have Parkinson's Disease or whatever is being treated.
How are they going to guess which neurons? Which healthy person is going to let them genetically engineer their neurons? Those neurons are going to behave the same, though they're now expressing proteins that make them work like retinal cells?
Installing these shutdown hooks is a neat trick. But not for neurological medicine. Maybe for some biomechanics or biocomputation. Throwing genes into neurons for probing with light so violates our most absolutely personal spaces - inside our craniums and our genomes - that the cure is worse than the disease.
--
make install -not war
I think the part about controling fits is very vaugue, I read "sponsor bait" or to be more polite speculation. Overall I think TFA gave the impression they are planning to use it to non-invasively investigate "circuits" in the hope of creating a device that can predict and prevent a fit with the minimum of intervention.
The news (to me) in the story is a non-invasive tool that can "flip" individual neurons into a binary on/off state in a controlled manner. I don't know what current "tools" are capable of, nor their level of invasiveness, but it seems to me a wetware debbuging tool such as this could lead to an explosion of knowlage that would make it worthy of a Nobel prize in the not too distant future.
Having said that, AFAIK indivdual neurons are not binary, their activity level is mesured as a "frequency". It would be interesting to know if the neuron's firing frequency can be controlled with more resolution than the simple on/off implied in TFA.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In totally unrelated news, Microsoft corporation has announced a slight change of M$ Vista logo into an animated one, which will feature flashes of bright yellow. Anonymous sources at Microsoft explain the move as "one of the few options to improve Vista appeal"
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"All right, to cure your wild movements, we're just going to drill a hole in your head to let the sunlight in. Don't worry, this is a standard medical procedure that has been used for thousands of years. All right, let's get them demons outta there!"
No, actually the article directly implies that human treatment will come out of this:
;-)
You read the articles?!! What kind of sick fuck are you, anyway?
On an actual point, though, Mr. Boyden just states that this SORT of thing could be used in The Future. Look: "In the future, controlling the activity patterns of neurons may enable very specific treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases, with few or no side effects,"
See? No mention of actually using what they're making. My girlfriend's a geologist, and she's constantly pissed off at the media's treatment and communication of scientific discovery, because it makes normal people believe things that aren't really true. That's where I learned how to read with discretion. Before I just indexed the words like Google, and gave word counts.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Welcome to the Matrix.
How long will it take before they apply neural inhibition to the part of the brain that controls the mind-body interaction? Turn off the bodily links and you're in dream land. Control the dreams and you can create reality just like in the Matrix movies.
Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light
I wonder exactly how long this has been happening to president George W Bush, and is there any way to get his brain back?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...is that they'd have to cut open your head to use it on you. Otherwise I'd be ready to go buy myself some tin foil to make a nice hat (and some very dark shades). I'm not into conspiracy theories, but some kinds of power people just shouldn't be allowed to have.
'Fraid the kids at MIT are a little off. It's red and blue lights, and it explains why drivers on the highway come to a dead stop every time they see a car pulled over on the side of the road. Their brain activity stops. Of course!!!
Yellow light stops brain activity? No brain activity, no will power. No will power, useless Green Lantern ring...
So, even though the rings no longer have the "yellow impurity" Sinestro found a way to use yellow to stop the Green Lanterns. Someone call Hal, Jon, and Guy!
We been doin' this for generations... ya shine yer flashlight right into the frog's eyes, ya see, and them frogs, they just sit there, starin' back at ya. Then ya pull out yer critter net out and bag em.
Mmmm, good eatin, them frogs. 'Course it works with any varmint, but squirrel, that's lot tougher'n frogmeat. And bears, well, they's not too patient and less'n yer net's reeeeeal big...
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
am I the only one that first read that as MTV Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light?
Yellow Light? Did that make anyone else wonder whether they are only experimenting on the Green Lantern?
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
This is all fine bacterium.
But can they run Linux?
Have you read my journal today?
I seem to remember Wesley Crusher doing something like this in the episode where he bagged Ashley Judd.
I love how MIT spins bits. PLOS One is not a journal in any common sense of the word. Consider it more of a community annotated 'blog' where you can send in manuscript, and if *one member* of the editorial board considers it technically (though not necessarily scientifically) sound, it gets posted.
From the PLOS web site:
Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.
to invent the perfect republican voter.
This is an early april fools joke.
This "study" was conducted by members of the MIT Media Lab, yeah right
the same people who are into wearable computers, also have a bio-med division?
Yeah right, shine light upon a brain?? hmm a light bulb above the brain comic sketch?
Get a clue,
I said BUD light.
Learning more about the neural circuits involved in epilepsy could help scientists develop devices that can predict when a seizure is about to occur, allowing treatment (either shock or light) to be administered only when necessary, Boyden said.
An automatic anti-seizure device was featured in the novel "Terminal Man". Hope this one would work better.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I wonder why we would bother to genetically alter people with epilepsy to exhibit a gene that we can use to cure them with light. Why wouldn't we rather focus on getting rid of the problem gene altogether?
Yellow light shuts down brain activity in the drivers here in Nevada quite well.
Makes them forget that a yellow light means "go slow", not "go really really really fast".
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I, George W. Bush, President, United Gulags of America, being of somewhat sound mind and body, do hereby give notice to M.I.T that said technology is now the property of the Republican Party for the sole purpose of defending
Freedom and Democracy(tm).
Feloniously yours,
W.
...and now the rational part of my brain has stopped working :-(
We all have to eat Monsanto brand corn.
This will have the added benefit of preventing athlete's foot.
sigs, as if you care.
Commander Data already did this in "The Game."
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Aluminum foil hats. Shiney side out.
Have gnu, will travel.
... the new Flashy Yellow graphics on Fox News.
Though I'm sure an hour of the "Half our News Hour" will do the trick... they just want to make sure they have the latest brain-numbing technology.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
wake people up!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This fits the discovery by Brainerd in 2001 that the human (and animal) eye has a receptor for blue light that controls the circadian clock.
: www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP/gismo/105192.html+%2B IOL+%2B%22blue+light%22+%2Balertness&hl=en&ct=clnk &cd=5&
The cataract surgeons are debating whether it's safer to put in plastic replacement lenses that block blue (to maybe reduce the risk of eye damage from blue light), or if that's a bad idea. Turns out reducing blue during the daytime makes people sleepier.
There's a lot to this; I wonder if the MIT folks know about the other work in the area of using blue light to stay awake, and low-blue or no-blue light for sleepiness.
Can't quite tell from the bit online if this is the same chemistry or a different reaction.
Quick link to a hugely informative site that collects this sort of info for science reference:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:VaVv_OUCa4IJ
the Oval Office...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This explains Sponge Bob (and the effects of TV in general).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
George Bush has had a desk lamp with this sort of bulb for about 6 years.
Six years ago, I saw a team of doctors at the A.I.DuPont Children's Hospital using an incredibly bright light to look inside a sick infant. When held behind the child's arm, you could literally see the every bone and muscle; the light shone right through bones at least as thick as the average human skull (which is quite thin, except in the case of politicians). The light did not burn or otherwise obviously damage the child, and she is fine today.
Getting random neurons to take up new genes is probably doable, and supplying light to the entire brain non-invasively is probably doable, but the problems of targeting and control that you mention seem to be an order of magnitude more difficult... I don't think I'll be volunteering either.
Alas, even Wikipedia cannot explain these jokes. Anyone care to clue a gaijin in?
(What is rule 1, anyhow? Don't mess with football? Don't talk about 4chan? In Soviet Russia...)
all your brain are shutdown
As best I can decipher, rule 1 must be about self-reference? No clue about 2-4, although one of them might be no posts about which rules others broke (which would make that even more ironic).
And _ does not forgive sounds like a bad translation of a somewhat common Japanese phrase... which I can't remember right now (connection problems causing anime deficiency; I also think it wise not to visit 4chan from work to investigate). But I can't make any more sense out of it than that.
whose bright idea was this?
There are other ways to stop brain activity: a bullet comes right to mind (pun intended), and the Iraqi's look as if they've found others;^) Of course, only the Iraqi War is costing us more in tax dollars than this MIT study.
the brain being treated is colorblind?
oh marmalade.
I've had seizures for 22 years now(since I was 6) and would welcome any type of treatment. I had a right-temporal lobectomy 11 years ago that didn't help, so this is a breakthrough that gives me some hope of finally being able to get off medication's and lead a semi-normal life.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.---Scott Adams