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Rewiring a Damaged Brain
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in the Midwest are developing microelectronic circuitry to guide the growth of axons in a brain damaged by trauma. The goal is to rewire the brain connectivity and bypass the damaged region in order to restore normal behavior and movement. 'The device, which [professor Pedram Mohseni] calls a brain-machine-brain interface, includes a microchip on a circuit board smaller than a quarter. The microchip amplifies signals, called neural action potentials, produced by the neurons in one part of the brain and uses an algorithm to separate these signals — brain spike activity — from noise and other artifacts. Upon spike discrimination, the microchip sends a current pulse to stimulate neurons in another part of the brain, artificially connecting the two brain regions.'"
I would be curious to see if this could eventually be used to offset the effects of Brain Surgery as well.
Having gone through a waking craniotomy to remove a benign tumor from my left temporal cortex in 2006, I'd quickly come to realize that certain things I was capable of before surgery were very difficult, if not nearly impossible without re learning the process all over again. For me, the issue was a loss of linguistics. I was unable to pronunciate "B" or "V" for over a week and had to re-teach myself. Beyond that, I was no longer fluent at speaking both Spanish and English where I was before. None the less, I still consider myself lucky that I have my life and my memories still.
In any case, work such as this can only help foster a shorter recovery time for brain trauma patients or better yet, recover capabilities that could have been completely lost. Did I mention being a cyborg sounds cool too?
Nice to see treatments being developed. At least when I took that Philosophy of Mind course in the early 90's, most of what we knew about the brain came from trauma... specifically, bicycle accidents. Basically, case studies looked at where the trauma was located, and built hypothesis about what that area did based on what no longer worked correctly in the patient. Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was one of our texts, a collection of interesting studies along these lines. Brain damaged patients didn't get treatment regarding their brain truama, per se, they got studied. Sacks was a pure researcher... but somehow got involved with studying patients, and subsequently got fed up with the established idea that there were no treatments. see Awakenings.
We knew then that the brain tries to reroute things. I met someone recently that suffered from trauma induced skitzophrenia. He said it had been explained to him that a head trauma caused damage to a part of his brain that was between his eyes and that which interprets what he sees... and over time his brain rerouted the signals through other parts that were not damaged, such as memory centers... so he constantly is seeing people that aren't there, but are part of his memory. He claims there is a seamless interaction between these memory people, and the empirical environment... they are not ghosts, so he has to watch closely in crowds to see the reactions of people, and that's how he tells them apart... the memory people only react to movement, avoiding the real people and solid objects, but real people react to what is happening, what is being said, what they are watching.
Stem cell research appears to hold a lot of promise for brain trauma patients such as the man I met.
The Admin and the Engineer
The brain already does this itself. It's called neural plasticity. If they brain can do it, it will. If it can't, sticking wires into it and applying shocks and other intrusions and insults is not going to make it happen. Not properly anyway.
That makes just as much sense as saying that "the body heals cuts naturally, so stitching flesh together is not going to fix anything, not properly anyhow".