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MIT Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light

Posted by samzenpus on from the men-in-black dept.

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."

6 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Requires halorhodopsin gene by sshore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Requires halorhodopsin gene by TheSync · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There has already been an example of successful gene therapy with retroviruses, and no they didn't get caner, they were cured of cancer.

      However the blood-brain barrier is a limitation to brain gene therapy. So in 2003 a UCLA research team inserted genes into the brain using liposomes coated in polyethylene glycol.

  2. Re:Slight problem with their idea... by mrogers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It might be possible to use retroviruses to insert the light-sensitive genes into the patients' cells.

  3. All that glitters by abb3w · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.
  4. It's a wetware debugger. by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. See also: melanopsin, receptor in human eye, sleep by ankhank · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    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: www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP/gismo/105192.html+%2B IOL+%2B%22blue+light%22+%2Balertness&hl=en&ct=clnk &cd=5&