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Using Magnets To Turn Off the Brain's Speech Center
An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder). Researchers believe that the ability to stimulate or quell activity in specific areas of the brain may help in treating conditions like epilepsy and migraine headaches.
needs a zappie!
pff... real networks have been doing this stuttering thing since 1995.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
You can imagine govememnts using it matrix style "What good is a phone call if you can't speak, mr anderson?"
... that take away my speech centers when I meet a pretty girl.
I wonder what would happen if the magnetic pulses were applied to more important sections of the brain, such as the area that controls autonomous bodily functions, like the heart. I suppose, if it is capable of knocking out the area of the brain that controls speech, it should be capable of knocking out the section of the brain that controls other, critical bodily functions. Is it only me, or do you see a potential weapons application for this in the future?
shouldn't it be from the bzzt-ow-bzzt-ow-bzzzzzzzt-........ dept?
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
but can they make you sing folk songs?
Monstar L
What makes you think they will hear your objections?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
The notion that this pulse "turns-off" the targeted segment of the brain isn't correct. The pulse does NOT remove power from the brain or suppress neuronal firing. Instead, it disrupts coordinated firing of the neurons by inducing a spurious current in the neurons. Thus it is more like randomly applying a signal to the pins of a CPU than to cutting power or clipping pins.
I can't imagine that this pulse is very good for neuronal tissue in the short-term or long-term.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The technology to do this is (apparently) called transcranial magnetic stimulation. And even though it looks really freaky in the video with the twitching and everything, it appears to be safe as long as you don't suffer from epileps; in fact it's routinely done for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes.
I guess you still shouldn't try it at home, though.
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If only this had been developed 20 years ago, I'd still be married. (I'd have ordered two right off the bat -- one for her and one for her mother.....)
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
This technology is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (or TMS).
I'm speechless!
This is very exciting as it could point to a future where you can literally hack your own brain. So far it looks like he can only temporarily disrupt parts of a person's brain... what about enhancement? What about non-invasive brain I/O?
... now I think after seeing this video ... perhaps it had a grain of truth? Hopefully someone will conduct some experiments.
What I think could also be very interesting is what kinds of background effects do things like the Aurora have on people's brains? I lived in far-north Alaska for many years and I remember that anecdotally everyone talked about strange dreams when the Aurora was active. It could have been merely a sub-conscious suggestion that active Aurora leads to altered dream states or
[signature]
So here I was, speedreading through /., and the scientific suggestion of
"Using Maggots To Turn Off The Brain's Speech Center"
snatched my Sunday morning mind's attention like a zombie. Litereally. So, is there something here I'm missing? Like how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain, assuming it's not major surgery to introduce them? And why...? Is DARPA going over to the dark side in the fight against terrorists?
Alas, after 15 second of grimacing and beweilderment I realized my sleep-hazed eyes were misreading.
Dang, I hope I didn't give some royalty fee collection company another bad idea to file a patent for...
what use is a phone call if you are ... unable ... to ... speak?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You're making the classic engineering mistake: mis-defining the problem.
Disrupting the speech centers of the brain does not preempt attempts at communications. And you need communication; it's just that men, left to themselves, would communicate by passing terse status messages: "I'm hungry"; "I'm angry"; "I'm going to sleep"; "I want sex."
Women send the same status messages, but they seem to gain satisfaction out of the process itself. Therefore they send messages in steganographic form: the basis status messages are there, wrapped all kinds of other data which do not require your immediate action. It pays to pay at least some attention; she may start an "I want sex" status message by telling you that her sister's neighbor's aunt is going in for a gall stone operation.
The wise man knows that he should celebrate the differences between the sexes if he wants to celebrate the difference between the sexes.
Therefore, it is best to cultivate the skill of appearing mildly interested and engaged, making reflexive, non-committal listening responses, and paying just enough attention to pick out any cues that indicate something that requires immediate action. It's a lot like driving, actually. You get that sixth sense for when somebody is going to cut you off, or roll into an intersection without coming to a stop. It's not magic, it's practice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In other news, it was revealed President Bush has been wearing a toupe for years to hide an area of partial baldness. "I love it!" Mr. Bush exclaimed. "I found this great place that uses rare earth magnets to keep 'em on your head. Real convenient like."
how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!
You can't take the sky from me...
Doesn't this imply that non-ionizing EM (for example, radio waves) may in fact disrupt brain function in some way? A high intensity pulse can apparently disrupt a major function.
Keep in mind that a typical TMS coil induces a current in brain neurons by generating a field which goes from 0 to 2 Tesla in about a tenth of a millisecond. Even then, the field is only effective at neural stimulation a centimeter or two away from the coil's focal point. I'm not too familiar with devices which generate non-ionizing EM, but I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find something with those sorts of characteristics.
As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.
There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything
* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)
* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.
There's actually another neat video (from an intro psych textbook website from a couple years ago) showing the effects of TMS on Broca's area. The guy counts numbers upwards, and as they stimulate Broca's on the left side he experiences a disruptive effect (afterwards saying, "That was cool" ;). They also stimulated on the analogous region on the right side, showing that this participant had no observable effect.
So they gave him instructions before they started, "If you start to feel pain, tell us to stop. OK, now we're going to disrupt your speech center."
Sadly, sexual orientation is not, to the best of my knowledge, something one can alter at will.
- the effects are local. Whereas using electrodes, you basically fry the whole brain.
- much finer tunning : you can slightly increase or dicrease the probability of neurons firing in target area, and have a lot of freedom of controlling how much "slightly". In my opinion, there is more fraud. Here is a quote from the article: 'Prof Allan Snyder, at the University of Sydney believes TMS can act as "a creativity-amplifying machine".' Not exactly, this the "... and maybe one day, we'll cure cancer / produce fast and cheap petabyte sized harddisk / eliminate terrorism / develop WMD", also known as "money whoring". Just putting some outrageously far-reaching speculation, in the hope the someone in the government will notice them and pour money in.
Their "creativity stimultion application" is probably just shutting down some brain regions and stimulating other to see how this altered state of mind influence creativeness. Actual artists have been doing this for age using marijuanna, LSD, etc... except for *much* *much* *much* cheaper.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Take this story, for example. .
It is for these reasons, among others, that I find the whole mass adoption of cell phones and the resulting soup of EM broadcast transmissions in our cities and homes troublesome, and why I find myself sighing at those who insist on repeating the telecommunications corporate propaganda: that non-ionizing radiation is harmless, (which I suppose might be true if one considers mass manipulation of human awareness 'harmless'), that the sun puts out more EM than any man-made device which therefore means that there is nothing to be concerned about, (a silly argument since life IS affected by the white noise from space, but has adapted to deal with it in some interesting ways, as opposed to deliberate coherent signals which affect cells in a variety of reliable and repeatable ways), and that studies on rats don't mean anything because rats != humans, and other such nonsense arguments.
This is just more fodder for the fire. Ignore at your own risk. (And with EM, the more you ignore, the faster and easier it becomes to ignore. Zombie nation.)
-FL