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Light Helps Injured Mice Walk Again
Mantrid42 writes "Researchers have been able to affect the brains of lab mice using light. Working in a new field called Optogenetics (optical stimulation plus genetic engineering), scientists injected lab mice with genes that can stimulate or inhibit neural activity based on the color of the light they're exposed to, and can be targeted to infect only on certain cell types. Additionally, another gene has been added to make neurons glow green when firing, allowing two-way communication between a brain and a machine."
Does that make them..... Optical Mice?
The operation is a real breakthrough for crippled mice everywhere, but they have to avoid kaleidoscopes for the rest of their lives...
Additionally, another gene has been added to make neurons glow green when firing, allowing two-way communication between a brain and a machine."
I know that changes to genes generally have to go into the cells when they are growing, but I wonder if the mechanism which does this could be manually installed in the nervous system (so to speak) so that living organisms (me) could export their brain activity as pulses of green light.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Laser Mice...
what a neat idea this and a laser at the right wavelengths(s) could manipulate a transparent surface of connected neurons very nicely, and like multi layer dvd technology, they could probably stack the layers. never heard of anything like this before.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
This puts a lot of sense into the phrase "he is a bright person". Literally when you do a lot of thinking, your brain will shine.
Could this then actually lead to the 'chip in the brain' concept and create a human/robot hybrid? This is getting into some scary territory...
Any other dollhouse watchers out there see the connection. Whats next? Freeze rays?
This is the DNI we've been waiting for... The surgeon pops open your skull, injects some strategic locations with some gene altering viruses and installs some flashing lights. Now you can do two-way communication with a computer. What you experience depends on which cells were modified, and what program you're running. With sufficient funding for targeted research, we could see this technology in new kinds of: cochlear implants for the deaf, vision implants for the blind, artificial limb control and feeling for amputees.. and the continued improvement of those technologies will eventually lead to full sensation virtual reality immersion for anyone who can afford it. And we haven't even gotten into the gritty details of what we can learn about the brain using this technology.. reverse engineering is so much easier when you can poke as well as peek.
How we know is more important than what we know.
encounters some of these mentally enhanced Stanford mice?
Clearly more research funding is needed (grad students: file for NSF grant).
I mostly love this article, but it kinda glosses over how much more difficult it is to read out information out optically than it is to stimulate neurons with light. When you stimulate neurons you just need any ole photon, doesn't matter how many times it bounced around, or where it came from.. which is good because the brain isn't so much transparent, its kinda a milky haze. However, when you want to record optically from them you have to make an image of the neurons (unless you want all the neurons signals to get mixed together) and so you care about where all the photons came from. In order to take really effective pictures in the brain you need a fancy two photon microscope, and although some people are playing around with making tiny ones that one could potentially carry around on ones head.. they aren't really going to every be practically chronic implants for anyone, for many reasons.. but first of all you need to hook them up to a large, expensive infrared laser to make it work. That's not to say all this optical reading isn't really awesome, because scientists can make use of it to learn things about brains in more constrained situations.. i just wouldn't look to it to be the missing link in brain machine interfaces anytime soon.
when you're injured.
oh noes, now doctors will say WALK TOWARDS THE LIGHT!
Most amazing piece I've read on science in a long time. This makes the genome projects look like stepping stones. If you read the whole thing and can't see the amazing power of this field you will hopefully be one of the early benefactors because you need it.
Or was it a TV show?
Which ever it was, humanity was almost assimilated into a collective.
Can they make my eyes to glow red when I am angry?
Only I was expecting somebody to say something like:
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Typo in tfa url and in the summary. Optigenetics?? wth is that supposed to mean? I must be blind I'll go see an optimitrist ~_~
The blind mice ran after the farmer's wife and got their tails cut off with a carving knife.
So we have mice that can see but can't run ... that is just the way things should be. What do they do? They get them running, and you know how this ends.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Holy paladins already knew about the curative powers of the Light :)
..... Corp announces its latest TV screen technology. The screens, driven by photon emitting mouse brains have higher contrast and a greater viewing angle than existing OLED or OLEP screens. Furthermore, the new screens are environmentally friendly being powered only by cheese and 100% biodegradable. Dead mice are replaced easily and cheaply. The new NeuroVision screens are expected to hit the market as soon as problems with the Cat Repulsion Technology (CRT) have been ironed out.
He's alive! He's alive!!! He's alive!!!!!!
I, for one, welcome our new optical mice overlord
Step into the light, little mouse. What? No wait!
While the breakthrough is absolutely fantastic, the possible avenues for further research comes in direct conflict with free will.
If shining light on a person's brain can do a lot more things than the person brain is actually capable of, what does free will mean exactly?
What prevents a mad scientist from creating an army of human killing machines, all under the influence of light?
A potential issue I didn't see addressed in the article - crosstalk. What happens when an outbound signal, neuronal activity triggering a light pulse, is produced at the same wavelength (color) as another is tweaked to "listen" for? Would the brain be able to compensate and filter out such signals, as this essentially creates a form of an artificial permanent link between the two? Or maybe this isn't an issue beyond, say a few hundred microns, because the energy of the outgoing photons is below the sensitivity threshold of the listening ones? Otherwise, it might not be very practical to have to deal with your left knee bending every time you think of the letter "P".
Also, in theory, how many wavelengths could different molecules be produced to fluoresce (if this is even the right term) at? Same thing for the light-sensitive ones. How wide is the sensitivity waveband? IOW, how large a bandwidth can we expect to command, in each direction? Or put in even simpler terms, how many different things can this technology be employed for, simultaneously?
The atheist,by merely being in touch with reality,appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors
Christopher Reeve will finally be able to walk again. He should be good in the new remakes of several popular films, such as "The Night of the Living Dead".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
...but I'm not looking forward to the day when a few light pulses can alter human behavior. Just think about that.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.