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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
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
...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.
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.
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? =>
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
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!
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.
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It is only logical that the heatsink would be the visible component. After all, foil keeps the heat in. Therefore the logical setup is aluminum foil hat with a small gap for heatsink connection, and only aluminum components in the heatsink, thus covering the gap in the aluminum foil hat. That way you could have all the benefits of the aluminum foil hat and a heatsink. Also THEY would never know you had shielding under your heatsink.
We are the Borg...
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.
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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.
Yeah, or he would've OD's at 27 and we wouldn't even have E=MC
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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.
Nah, we may have E=MC, but he wouldn't have got to the whole squared bit?
which is totally what she said
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.)
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The scary thing is that there are people out there who drill holes in their head for fun. There are claims that it improves your thinking or wellness or something, but I can't help but to think that the people who actually do this aren't the kind of people I want to ask about improving my thinking.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hi, mom? Yeah, can you find my birth certificate? I want to check up on my warranty. Oh, it's expired? Good. Can I borrow some of dad's powertools this weekend?
which is totally what she said
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.
,,goes best with black rubber suit
I'm thinking a passive radiator might work. Say something like an aluminum mohawk -- perhaps shaped like stegasaurus dorsal plates.....
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.
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?