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."

Comments

Re:Or Wolfe

[cnettel]

This is direct exposure, not through the eyes. In addition, the neurons have been altered (an added gene with a photosensitive product) to respond to this treatment.

Re:Slight problem with their idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

The talk in the article of using this technique to help patients with various diseases is just hype to keep the funding bodies happy. Life science grants in the States have been cut substantially becauses of Bush's war-mongering and there's a scramble for cash. On the other hand, the technique is very interesting for pure neuroscience research because we now have a way of using light to rapidly and very selectively switch activity on and off in a brain slice. Up to this point we've had to either bathe the whole slice in a substance that alters activity or to apply it through a pippette to the region of interest. The latter method is obviously better but requires careful application and the substance may need to be washed out before continuing the experiment. Using light allows us to control activity like a switch and by focusing the signal we'd be able to stimulate or inhibit (multiple?) regions of whatever size we saw fit. This is damn exciting stuff.

Re:Yellow light?

[Goaway]

As far as it is possible to make any kind of statement about this, sunlight is white.

With Light + *Genetic Engineering*

[Doc Ruby]

When neurons are engineered to express the halorhodopsin gene, the researchers can inhibit their activity by shining yellow light on them.

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.

L.O.O.K.E.R.

[HTH NE1]

Nah. I think they're trying to make the Disco-Hypno gun from Looker

Ah yes, the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun (Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Energetic Responsers).

Re:Finally!

[grammar fascist]

... 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".

You mean that big, blue room?

I dunno about you, but I have problems going in there in the first place. That room is big. And it's got that huge, moving light that radiates heat. Probably, what, 1000 watts? Boggles the mind.