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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"
Finally I can get a pair of tinfoil shades to go with my hat.
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.
Considering certain patterns of falling boulders, as found on some mountains, for example, have the ability to bring death and people the suffer from Epilepsy (sic!). it makes sanse that certain patterns of falling boulders would also be able to reverse that effect.
NOT!
Common sense is not a substitute for knowledge. The two effects are not even related.
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.
welcome our new yellow light emitting overlords!
Another sexist topic about blonde girls !
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
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?
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]
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?
TV has been shutting all of our brains down for decades.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
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.
Obviously. It's already been proven in cartoons time and time again that if something falling on your head causes amnesia or a personality change that additional impact to your head will cure it. In the case of personality change you may need to apply such force several times as you may simply trigger alternate personalities instead, but you can repeat until satisfied.