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Brain Heatsink Could Reduce Epilepsy
SimonNight writes "Attaching a heatsink to the brain can reduce the severity of epileptic seizures, Japanese researchers say. They've developed a surgically implanted heat conduit that connects a brain region to a heatsink on the outside of the skull. Seizures get worse when they abnormal activity of brain cells overheats the brain and causes more abnormal firing patterns."
Now we can start overclocking! Break out the red bull and inject-into-the-heart adrenaline.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Just make sure you have health insurance before you sink your electric drill into your temple.
...if that means we can start overclocking our brains too.
:)
I can't wait to see people walking around with heat sinks sticking out of their skull. Will they have designer ones?
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Sweet! How much of an overclock can I get versus air cooling?
Chris Knight is my hero.
Wake me when they have a water cooling option for the brain. Not this boring neuropipe nonsense.
Are they going to use that new Neurotic Silver Ceramic for the heatsink paste?
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
Nice diagram. Is that a fan sticking out the side of the guy's head? Should newegg add a new category for 80mm and 100mm brain cooling fans? Or maybe go water cooled for complete silence? The worst that could happen is it leaks and you finally get the shower you're long overdue for...
I'd avoid the liquid nitrogen option at this time.
AMD makes brains now? ;-)
It's a joke laugh...
I for one welcome our new temperature regulated cyborg overlords.
If the problem seems to be too much heat, why do they try to use difficult to install heatsinks?
Underclocking people! Makes the system way more stable.
Dependency hell? =>
there is nothing more annoying than the whir of a pc fan. now we are going to have epileptics walking around with pc fans whirring on the side of their heads? even those chessy looking "turbo" fans for the processor? uggh, ugly too. how do you accessorize that? earings?
nah, i'd rather they be epileptics. then when they seize, i can just walk away, like any aesthetically responsible citizen. rather that than have to see and hear all of those epileptics walking the street with pc fan assemblies on the side of their heads
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I doubt the heatsink is contributing anything to the patients ability to regulate cranial temperature. More likely, its providing an electrical ground that helps alleviate the conditions that lead to a seizure.
http://img36.picoodle.com/img/img36/9/10/8/f_BalmerFanm_cd5ddbc.jpg
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
"No, I swear it's not a tinfoil hat! It's a brain heatsink!"
Didn't Cuddy the dwarf build a "thinking cap" for Detritus the troll, with a clockwork cooling fan to help cool his silicon brain so he could think faster? There's got to be a joke in there somewhere, what with trolls, cooling fans and everything else, but I'm too lazy to put the bits into the right order. Sort of like the maths teacher who, seeing the corridor on fire and an extinguisher on the wall, returned to bed satisfied that a solution existed.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Couldn't this be dangerous if the person was exposed to cold temperatures? Cool the brain down too much?
It seems like most (all?) heat sinks can transmit heat back (or remove heat by being too cold).
It seems like haveing a slug on your head that could directly cool/heat your brain accidentally according to weather/environmental factors would be dangerous and scary... or at the least hard to manage.
He is just desperately trying to be a cool guy. You get it? Cool.
Interesting developement. An analogous idea was used by Alastair Reynolds in Redemption Ark where one of the characters was genetically modified to have high neural processing speeds and required a 'heatsink' (made of bone and blood vessels) to dissipate the extra heat.
In invasive BCIs, a big problem is getting information out of the head, so many researchers have been using wireless transmission of power and data either by RF (popular) and less commonly IR. The reason they do this is because of infections- and you do not want a brain infection. So how does this heat conduit really work? A direct link from inside the skull to outside the skull is not a good idea, and if there's any skin in between the heat sink and the conduit then that skin is going to die. Maybe it's causing more problems than it solves. If it does what it says it does, then we could easily throw in some more BCIs and not have to worry about too much heat dissipation, which has this nasty tendency to kill brain cells. I maintain a small page on neurotech.
Overclocking!
Mind you, we've had speed (amphetamine sulphate) for ages. And it never really caught on with geekers.
Shame. Imagine Einstein on speed? 2x as many MC^2 per year.
Open source, flash charts
Does this mean I can cook breakfast on my head now?
For only $10,999 you can upgrade that implant to include a HDD, L1 and L2 caches, and a 3.0 GHZ dual core processor!
Apparently there is a fault in the design, you can't underclock it anymore without flatlining when you watch reality tv and still peoples brain heat up. Mostly from its fevered attempts to crawl out your ear hole.
But hey, think of it like this, with proper cooling we can really start poring in the juice and all be geniusses. It will be brilliant, we grow so intelligent cooling our brain and powering it up, we might suddenly realize how stupid that is.
Now that is irony, overclocking your brain to become smart enough to realize it is going to kill you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe. Or, it could be that the higher the temp in your brain, the greater metabolism has effect with neural firing.
Life is not for the lazy.
this is just gonna make trepanation advocates that much more insufferable, if that's even possible.
- js.
This is from Japan, so obviously this is just another step toward a direct brain interface for battle mechs.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I thought all brains were liquid cooled....
No sig today...
I made one for my brother when I was in High School. He was complaining about the thermostat temperature. My room was always 10 degrees colder, so I didn't want the AC cranked anymore than it was. So I took an old Pentium heat sink fan combo, attached a headband and 9 volt. He used it for a while. I'll ask my parents if they still have it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That makes perfect sense, since the salts in blood and cranial fluid are such excellent insulators.
How does this not open the brain cavity up to Serious Infections? Re: Meninges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meninges Aren't our brains "water cooled" (by blood) in the first place?
The funny thing is the brain already is liquid-cooled. That liquid being the blood, of course. (Perhaps you were already going for this in your joke, but if so, it'll go over so many heads that I thought it worthwhile to explain it in more depth.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
..it's only a matter of time before we'll be able to buy clear brain casings to mod our heads! I for one welcome our brain-modded overlords.
Years ago our family had a Brittany Spaniel that started Grand Mal epileptic seizures at around 1 year of age. Phenobarbitol only moderately increase the time period between seizure clusters by a week or so.
;]
While comforting the dog immediately post-seizure one evening, I noticed that he felt warm - his entire body was overheated, as though he'd just come in from a long walk on a hot summer day. To me, the obvious thing to do was to crush 10-15 ice cubes, dump them in a ziploc bag and apply it to the crown of his head. The effect was immediate, and amazing. His anxiety and discomfort disappeared immediately, and the "brain chiller" icepack seemed to lessen the severity of any subsequent cluster seizures, and reduce the number of seizures in a cluster (to almost petit mal effect.)
To me, this feels like another forehead smacking "well, DUH" discovery.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Z.
Fristy prostt
You could also try to develop a temperature sensitive neural inhibitor. That seems more feasible since you don't necessarily have to identify the region you want to be affected.
Smart people would've adjusted the vents throughout the house to control the air-flow better. (My room was closest to the AC unit, so I'm familiar with the problem.)
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This kinda reminds me of the cooling vest worn by mechwarriors.
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I'm getting this mental image of an aluminum mohawk coming out of somebody's head, like the sail on the back of ol' Dimetrodon.
I'm certain this has probably been done in some anime already. Most likely in the late 80's/early 90's.
,,goes best with black rubber suit
Anyone else reminded of the Conjoiners from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series? There's definitely mention of Skade having a modified skull like a crest to increase the surface area for blood cooling purposes.
1. Blow air through the ears. 2. Put a radiator on the neck and cool the whole brain down. 3. Wear an ice-togue 4. Move to a northern clime and live in an igloo. 5. No profit - solutions are too cheap.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Examples: cool hats
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Would an MRI rip this thing out by the roots?
Too bad there's only one slot in the head for a heatsink. I wonder if stacking the arms and torso full of them would work.
What a great idea. A very visible device that announces to the entire world that the unfortunate wearer is an epileptic. Epilepsy is a disease that many people are ashamed of because it makes them "different" from everyone else. Can you imagine a child being taunted for such a device? I certainly can.
Even adults are reluctant to admit that they have the disease for fear of being different. About 9 years ago I played in a recreational coed volleyball league run every fall by my apartment complex. I was a team captain and I complained to the league organizer about halfway through the season about a very strange young lady on my team who didn't drive a car and didn't have normal reflexes. Public transportation is very poor where I lived at the team, so it was definitely quite abnormal for someone to live there and not drive a car. She had to get rides from other people for everything - to go to games, to go to work, etc. I was told by the league organizer that she didn't drive because she had epilepsy. I was quite shocked because this young woman never mentioned it to me when I took her to our games and she acted like she never drove because she never needed to in the past. In reality she couldn't get a driver's license because her epilepsy was too severe. So if even adults are afraid to admit that they have it, I'm having a hard time believing that very many people are going to volunteer for such an obvious display to the world that something is different about them.
I'm thinking a passive radiator might work. Say something like an aluminum mohawk -- perhaps shaped like stegasaurus dorsal plates.....
but does it cook an egg yet ??
ice cream brain freeze .... good.....!
Indeed it is crazy... but I wonder how many people will be willing to put a heatsink in their head.
I'm going to tear God a new asshole for doing such a crappy job with the thermal paste.
Everyone knows that the default heatsink never works as well as it needs to.
Look for a boom in tower and pipe-style heatsink sales among epileptics in the near future.
For those of you opposed to systens controlling the physiology of our brains, resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
I'm so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. -Bender
with trolls being able to think better when it's cold.
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAD), but I understood that part of the problem with high fevers was that the heat eventually caused brain damage. I wonder if such a device would have a fever-lowering effect as well. Obviously, we're not going to start installing these in every kid with the flu, but I'm curious if this would work.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
I doubt the heatsink is contributing anything to the patients ability to regulate cranial temperature. More likely, its providing an electrical ground that helps alleviate the conditions that lead to a seizure.
I'm sure your years of research conclusively prove that those Japanese researchers are wrong.
In one of Pratchett's Discworld novels (The Fifth Elephant, maybe), Sargent Detritus, a troll, who, like all Discworld trolls, have silicon-based brains, starts wearing a helmet with fans built into it. The fans help cool his brain, allowing him to think faster. Lock him in a freezer for a few hours, he'll figure out the answer to the ultimate question, assuming he doesn't freeze to death first.
#include <signature.h>
...than cutting a hole in the skull. Really a case of "because we can."
My wife has MS and the episodes of MS are more likely to happen when you get too hot. There are various devices to cool the body and the brain/spinal column in particular, that the MS Society has recommended.
The simplest is to take a break when you get hot, sit in the shade, and drink something cold to lower core body temperature.
Next is a "neck tie/ascot" filled with watergel, that stuff they put in the bottom of flowers to slowly release water. The water evaporates, providing additional cooling. Placed around the neck it has a big impact on the blood flow into the brain.
Sharper Image has a more high tech version that looks vaguely like it's from Dune. It is a collar, or perhaps a torc, that sits across the back of your neck and includes small fans. The combination of metallic plates, the water reservoir, and a blower you get a much larger temperature drop.
Then you get into the serious cooling vests that range from being filled with watergel for a full-torso temperature reduction to icepack reservoirs that provide extensive cooling.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Yeaaaah. I'm sure that the scientists involved in this project are so ignorant that they can't tell the difference between electrical and thermal conductivity, and you are much smarter than them. That makes perfect sense. Oh, wait...
Anyway, the way I read it, it isn't regulating "cranial temperature" as a whole but rather operating on the small localized area in the brain that is being affected by the epileptic seizures. What this brings to mind for me is a similarity to severe muscle cramps, which I assume is caused essentially by the relevant nerves being temporarily over-stimulated for some reason, kind of like the storm of electrical nerve activity that happens in the brain during an epileptic seizure. When I get a muscle cramp it is usually in one particular muscle. Could it be that (A) a muscle cramp usually happens in one particular area because the nerve bundles leading to that area tend to overheat and become susceptible to this seizure activity, and (B) an epileptic seizure is just the equivalent of a "brain cramp" that happens to occur in one particular area of a person's brain that is susceptible to this overheating? I'm sure this is a vast oversimplification of course, and possibly a complete misunderstanding of the causes of muscle cramps, but it's interesting to think that the two apparently unrelated symptoms might actually end up being closely related phenomena, biologically speaking.
Let us just pray they don't add bluetooth-enabled devices for controlling the heatsink's fan. Norton's Anti-Spaz 2012. Detects and eliminates all brainware automatically.
:wq
Thanks for someone finally making a serious post, Steve. I've suffered Grand Mal epilepsy since 1987, and your comments are right on the money. Fortunately I rarely have seizures these days, but it has taken a long time for things to stabilise. They are truly debilitating.
Mike
Linux fan and Win32 developer
To get the best results, the literature shows that the brain needs to be chilled below normal temperatures. In some old experiments, they would pour ice water directly on an exposed portion of the brain. Two bits of interesting information from that were there were no long term negative effects of reducing portions of the brain to 5C, and in some cases epilepsy was cured. So why did they dump ice water directly? Unfortunately, the brain has more blood flow than most any other tissue. So you are fighting the warming effect of the blood. Unlike your fingers, the body does not shut down blood flow to the brain as it gets cool.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You'll be happy to know that human experiments back up your discovery. Ice water has been poured on exposed human brains to stop seizures with excellent results. Seizures were stopped, and in some cases eliminated permanently. Sounds like a joke, doesn't it? But the results were good enough that the only reason it probably isn't don't today is the craniotomy. However, similar experiments (like what the Japanese are doing) are pushing towards eliminating having a gaping hole in your head.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Yes, but will it make you responsible for Gundam?
I thought the brain was supposed to cool the heart anyway. At least that is what Aristotle said: http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126536/main.php?currentchap=5¤tsect=history.htm
Some people's migranes are triggered by extra heat in the head, so it might help them ( us ) as well
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There may be something here ... this underlying idea combining "heat and seizure" is notable.
See, my wife has suffered petit and grand mal seizures since the age of eleven. Up until a change in medications, she was always 'hot to the touch' -- at night radiating heat like a toaster (nice for those cold Canadian winter nights). Sadly, those were years in which seizures came at a weekly, sometimes daily, interval. Since the medication change, she no longer is hot to the touch but cool, sometimes even cold (and can feel chilled in hot weather). Happily, seizure frequency has changed from weekly to yearly.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, is there truly a meaningful correlation here between temperature and seizure frequency? I'm certainly going to investigate further.
As someone who suffers from migraines, which have a close relation to epileptic seisures, I can attest that I've often felt like my brain was overheating before and during the migraine. Adding additional cooling sounds reasonable enough. On the other hand, cooling pads never made me feel better. Perhaps they only cool my skin and muscles, leaving my brain to melt down...
Insert self-referential sig here.
(a parody of a Monty Python sketch)
I have occipital-temporal lobe epilepsy. It's hard on other people in a different way than for me because I don't remember the seizures, and everyone else does. I come out of them and everyone is shaken, saying stuff like wow, I feel bad for you, it must be difficult etc etc etc and I say, well, I don't remember anything. Seizures are profoundly disruptive to memory. I do have some memories of the actual event, something like extreme pain and screaming agony, but they are very dim.
There is some pipeline your brain uses to consolidate memories from immediate experience through short term memory into long term memory, and seizures seem to disrupt that completely. There is retrograde amnesia. If I have a seizure on Wednesday, then memories of Monday will be faint. Memories of Tuesday will be even crappier. Memories of Wednesday morning are extremely faint and scattered. The seizure itself is just a blackout with faintly remembered edges. There is also anterograde amnesia. On Friday the acquisition of new memories is impaired, but less than it was on Thursday. Studying and memorization tasks are difficult. And the impairment lasts a long time. The most insidious thing about it is that I never really know when I'm back at 100%. I just notice in hindsight that the things I do get less and less stupid over time.
Executive function is impaired. Even if it's been a week since the seizure and I feel OK, and everyone has been thinking I'm fine, I'm still writing crappy code longer than I realize. It compiles, is readable, fast, works nicely, etc. but later when I step back and look at it, I realize, WTF is this trying to do? It makes no sense in some subtle way. I only realize later that I didn't understand what my intent was. Decision making is really messed up after seizures, especially during the fugues right afterward. I lost my cellphone during a seizure last year and even though I was dizzy and nauseous I walked a mile up a railroad track in Cupertino to find it. (This is sometimes the only clue I have of a recent seizure- something important is missing, like one of my shoes, etc.)
Something I'm realizing is that you don't really need much of your brain working if you're going to walk around and talk to people. (This has given me a lot of insight into the way other people behave.) I can be unconscious or in a fugue state, and do complicated stuff like interacting with people, making foolish purchases, convince people I'm OK (easy if I don't remember the seizure). I don't remember what I'm not remembering, and if I'm not fully conscious I can still bullshit my way through things. You can even drive a car like that. Back when I had a license, I had a seizure in a parking lot. Then I immediately forgot about it and drove home not realizing I was post-ictal. I didn't wrap the car around a tree, but I did get lost on the way home from work. By the time I regained consciousness I had driven miles out of my way.
Goes a long way, as a person with a severe seizure disorder, and as a person who just had a 5 year old child placed into a medical coma to ease suffering after 9 months of 24/7 seizures. (He has been placed in the coma to die without further pain) had this device been available a year ago... For myself generally a massive control environment, actions and medication helps for the child we had tried everything from placing electrodes into his brain in an attempt to restart the seized areas of his brain to blood cooling etc.. as from the comments I have read the vast majority of the posters are both clueless and well as rude morbid and downright pathetically uneducated let me assist you with at least a simple explanation of a seizure. like the base work seize, a seizure is caused from any single area or center of you brain stops (i.e. seizes) this causes a mass firing of nerves often this mass firing, often thought to be caused from the back up from the stopped area, spreads to other areas of the brain causing an over load and causing the other areas to seize from such a mass firing as this spreads (when it continues) or if it gets to an area controlling a motor function the pat of the body no longer receiving a signal from the stopped center of the brain twitches as both muscle and opposing muscle try to contract simultaneously if the affected center of the brain that is stopped does not restart the process spreads as it effects many motor control sections you see a grand mal seizure often micro seizures occur in almost everyone that are too short or never spreading to a motor control area to be noticed a seizure is NOT only from epilepsy. If I sound a little upset I am sorry I am at reading multiple postings that are rude crude as well as disrespectful for things they have no knowledge of! if the cooler is recommended to me from my neurologist you bet I would get it. would be worth the peace of mind as well as the savings of over $3200 worth of medications I take each month for life. I promise you my insurance would love it also!
I have epilepsy and have lived with it all my life. This story interests me as much as what it doesn't say, as for what it does say.
I have undergone brain surgery to alleviate my symptoms and take piles of medicine, but nothing has worked.
What I want to know are what are the side-effects from this type of equipment. The brain is a very sensitive organ. Just a few neurons misfiring out of the billions in the brain can cause seizures or other symptoms.
Stopping the brain from overheating is one thing, but stopping natural heat fluctuations in the brain may have unintended consequences.
We are talking here about the most complex organ in the body. Mess with it at your own risk, as I have discovered.
Since surgery I can barely tell the difference between different house keys, because the surgery to my right temporal lobe affected my visual memory.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
(I've had epilepsy since 1994, my latest seizure was in 2005.)
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
still doesnt stop you from downloading that horrible operating system Linux. seriously, what a fuckhead you would have to be to do that
This makes me even more worried about cell phone radiation - that does heat up as well.
Why can't we invent something that is good for you? Oh, wait, Guinness. OK then.
I agree with one writer - do you really need to open the skull for that or can you just generally cool the blood? Or is that not localised enough? As long as it helps I think it doesn't matter - I'm pretty positive that those that suffer this will be ready to do about anything to control the problem, I know I would.
Insert