Slashdot Mirror
Research Finds That Electric Fields Help Neurons Fire
An anonymous reader writes "'[T]he brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. ... New work ... suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication. "In other words," says Anastassiou, the lead author of a paper about the work appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience (abstract), "while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior," even though the neurons are not physically connected—a phenomenon known as ephaptic (or field) coupling. "So far, neural communication has been thought to occur almost entirely via traffic involving synapses, the junctions where one neuron connects to the next one. Our work suggests an additional means of neural communication through the extracellular space independent of synapses."' If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought — and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory. This is truly paradigm-busting work."
This might push back the goalposts for the AI researchers. If neurons communicate over some distance, as well as directly with synapses, that would be several orders of magnitude more connections than we had thought.
So it looks like there may be a rationale for wearing Tin Foil Hats after all. :)
what sort of electric field would having a set of headphones on generate?
The brain is a noisy thing. Neural pathways are prone to error and so there are many for any given purpose processing the signals numerous times to ensure accuracy by aggregate measure. Low power devices find it difficult to maintain accurate signals and the brain is no exception. Signal redundancy and repetition would seem to be measures of compensation for the noisy environment that is the brain.
That electrical signals affect one another due to magnetic flux is nothing new. That the brain operates at low power and low signal requirements would seem to be factors that make it all seem possible in spite of all the noise that goes in on the brain.
I doubt seriously that the brain USES this type of signal processing and more likely that this is the type of thing that its redundancy systems are seeking to filter out. It also seems more likely to me that this is a source of hindrance to the brain rather than an enabler of its function. This could, however, serve to explain how seemingly disparate functions, senses and memories can be connected.
This sounds like local field potentials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_field_potential). Forgive me, but I fail to see how the summary concludes that other radio waves and "electronics" can impact this.
" nurse was suspended by the state nursing commission and the state Department of Health after she made statements about mind-control and the CIA that ..."
"while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior,"
Such circularity would be ideal for some philosophical enquiries
In the anime 'a certain scientific railgun' something akin to electromagnetic waves emitted by human brains are manipulated to create a networked supercomputing cluster. Now it seems not so totally sci-fi.
This probably also helps explain why powerful electromagnetic wave-emitting devices attached to the skull can disable specific parts of the brain in experiments used to e.g. treat/temporarily induce autism.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If I read it right, it seems to imply a mechanism for the brain to counter external fields - i.e. either the same information is processed through multiple paths and then consolidated to ensure minimal interference, or, even cooler, individual neurons could have an "image" of the fields they expect around them (so they can respond to external interference).
Could this mean that telepathy in some form may exist?
"...and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory."
Bullshit. What concerns where? That conclusion was not in the article. They didn't even talk about region-specific areas like memory.
I swear, people are so dedicated to perpetuating this stupid myth that consumer electronic devices interfere with our brains. Its been so thoroughly debunked that it's almost in the same realm as anti-vaccination/autism beliefs (except it doesn't get people killed.)
Who's laughing now?
If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought
At least, that's what my girlfriend says.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I remember reading an article about a guy who was doing genetic algorithms with Xilinx chips, training them to recognize the words "stop" and "go" and set a line low or high accordingly. I can't find the article right now but I'll put in a better search later.
What he'd do is to say the word "stop" or "go" into a microphone and see what the circuit did. The genetic code was the array file input into the Xilinx chips, a string of binary data that his genetic routine would judge for fitness, splice, and retry.
He did several generations and eventually got a good working circuit. A series of ones and zeroes that recognized the words. It worked.
So he loaded the binary files into another board and it didn't work. Why? The genetic algorithm didn't view the circuits as digital. It was utilizing the gates as analog entities, each with it's unique characteristics to get the job done. When you move the code to another board it simply wouldn't work. There was more communication going on than the researcher's original notion imagined. He thought this was a binary exercise. Instead it turned out to be a subtle matter involving the shape of the response curves coming out of unique parts and electromagnetic field interaction. Nature didn't view this circuit as digital, it was more complex than that.
This article reminded me of that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Thank you, Mr. Electricity Company, for helping my neuron's fire!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I read this on Slashdot more than 5 years ago.
No, not exactly this, but a similar phenomenon.
Someone had used a programmable curcuit board and let it evolve using some simple evolutionary algorithm. After thousands or perhaps millions of iteration where only the best design solution(s) were allowed to survive they examined the final results. Strangely, one of the finalist could not be understood by the circuit board analysis program. So, they took to analyses the device manually. What they eventually found was that it had designed a little radio telescope of sorts which had sent its signal across an unconnected, empty area without wiring! I have tried several times to find the article again. If someone else remembers it, please, reply and gives us a link.
Anyhow, my friends and I speculated back then - cool what if this would happen in nature! And, wow, it looks like it has!
more importantly,
wtf happened to GLP?
We do get excited easily! But, then none of us are electrical engineers, and none of us are familiar with "capacitive coupling", which from the tone of your message is well known.
Anyhow, thanks for that information!.
Electrical field effects on the brain with respect to learning and memory has been a well studied area. If something groundbreaking is discovered now in that regard it would need to explain how repeated studies have shown no impact before it is considered anything but trivial. Concern is often unjustified and encouraged by those seeking to sensationalize.
Excellent!!! Thanks!
Searching for Adrian Thompson led me to the Slashdot article, from 2001: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/12/29/007258/Evolutionary-Computing-Via-FPGAs
Ten years ago? I just felt ten years older...
Have you ever seen the lineups for the launch of one of these gizmos? Lining up like peasants for bread, but instead of life sustaining nutrition, it was to get an iphone-iv before anybody else. How can you say nothing has interfered with these peoples brains?
Maybe everyone and everything is connected with some sort of quantum mechanical process.
Maybe your intelligence isn't yours, but a shared intelligence with your peer group.
Maybe I'm selling futures in LENR.
So it is possible to create a non-intrusive way to interface with computer/machine with thought alone. An application that is still years away due to a lack of sensitive equipment but may ultimately be similar to Star Trek BORG behavior.
I am hardly a scientist and absolutely not a doctor but if EM fields like the ones emitted from a cell phone had a drastic effect on brain function, wouldn't we notice? I can tell when i'm tired or drunk or otherwise unable to concentrate, and I don't get that feeling when my moms calls to see how I'm doing...
I believe I'm going to need it for real this time.
"This is truly paradigm-busting work." In fact, probably not. I haven't read the background articles in detail, but the observed effect is either expected or completely unoriginal. It's not completely uninteresting, but to describe it as paradigm-busting is seriously overstating the article's significance.
In a little more detail. Using local extracellular current injections (not airy-fairy distant fields) to stimulate neurons is a technique going back more than a hundred years (Galvani...). It has also been known for decades that neurons themselves produce such currents. The only question is a quantitative one: are they big enough to matter for other neurons? The neuron-induced effect in this article is shown to be small but probably noticeable. I'm not sure however that even that is original (it's so paradigm-busting that I haven't yet taken the time to search out the older literature).
The paper is also amusing in that the author presumably pushing all of this publicity (Henry Markram) has only one listed contribution - helping to write the manuscript. Guidelines for responsible scientific communication at
http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=responsibleConduct_authorsOfResearchManuscripts
indicate that mere writing is an insufficient contribution for authorship (note the "and"):
"1.6.1. SfN subscribes to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ definition of authorship as being based on “1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3..."
In other words, he did not contribute significantly to this work and is a guest author. Nature Neuroscience should have removed his name.
I swear, people are so dedicated to perpetuating this stupid myth that consumer electronic devices interfere with our brains. Its been so thoroughly debunked that it's almost in the same realm as anti-vaccination/autism beliefs (except it doesn't get people killed.)
Was it debunked before or after this study?
I would have expected the headline to be "Telepathy is real!"
Called 'volumetric transmission', using IIRC nitric oxide, as a gas.
Sample abstract: "In this paper, we show how the diffusion of the Nitric Oxide retrograde neuromessenger (NO) in the neural tissue produces Diffusive Hybrid Neuromodulation (DHN), as well as positively inuencing the learning process in the artificial and biological neural networks."
(and btw I still can't read most replies unless I enable jscript - which I won't - thanks for the new improved webbery).
(turns out I have to have js running to post a comment too - FFS!)
In pre-digital telephones there was a phenomenon called crosstalk where you could here faintly and sporadically someone else's conversation. Imagine if you were studying the phone system to try and discover how the city or country "thinks". Would you spend a lot of time analyzing the crosstalk?
Oh, and notice that this research was done in brain slices, Perhaps the effects are even less prominent in intact brains.
Creating something that works like the brain does not mean simulating how the brain works. Cars don't have legs, yet they perform the same function as horses.
I think it's funny how so many people believe that we will never be able to emulate the brain's functions because the brain seems to be so complex. Don't they realize that you can build complex things out of simple elements?
The whole English literature is an arrangement of twenty six letters and some punctuation symbols, think of that.
I remember being at a Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2002 and be told earnestly by an attendee that there was no noise in the brain =) Anyways, I think that the brain's neurons use whatever input is available as long as it consistently (by some measure) leads to 'good for the organism'. Inputs that aren't immediately useful are not noise (which has a negative connotation) but are ignored. Or stated otherwise, what is noise now may be useful input should an organism's context change.
There seems to be a persistent belief that the brain is somehow an isolated black box rather like a CPU in a computer. But the brain, like the rest of our bodies, is immersed in it's environment. It directly feels the effects of that environment and its processes must necessarily be modulated by that environment. For survival, it seems to me that the most surprising result would be if the brain did _not_ use every possible source of information to its fullest.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
And all those fears about the national stoopidification by TV appear groundless now. With almost a century of wireless RF broadcasting pretty much every where, we went to the Moon, developed antibiotics, and decoded the human genome!
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go stick my head in the microwave for a quick topping-off and then tackle the Sunday crossword puzzle!
This just means that it is true when my mom said I am special and that I had extra sensory perception ! I do know what others are feeling :)
Note that the sensations in synesthesia are from parts of the brain located next to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
He's got the cure for NAS
In many respects, the brain is isolated from the rest of the body. Search on "the blood-brain barrier" for more information. The brain is not like other organs integrated with the body at all.
Inputs which aren't useful are not ignored. The system has evolved to require redundant and repetitive signals as proof of validity. Occasional errors and aberrations are "filtered" out rather than ignored. This is an important distinction. Actually, as I asserted previously, it isn't even fair to say it is filtered so much as it is factored out.
When the brain processes every possible source of information to its fullest, you have severe autism. The human brain is simply not capable of handling too much information at once, which is why it must be filtered and why it evolved as it has.
Crap. Does this mean we have to push the singularity back again?
I think these findings means that ancient anatomists were on the right track. Chinese, indian, celtic - every culture had a unique, take on that which exists beyond the physical world.
In Chinese medicine, the body has several distinct networks of "subtle energy" which serve as blueprints for the physical systems. Some of these systems are the chakras, the aura, and the meridians. Disruptions in the energy systems will eventually result in problems in the physical systems.
Practically speaking, these findings should erase resistance to energy-based approaches to PTSD. But conventional wisdom changes slowly, even when it's wrong.
p.s. if you're really interested in a conversation about telepathy, I suggest emailing me (either through the above address or through my website), as the /. reality does not allow for the possibility of telepathy...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
... is interconnected with UTP. No crosstalk problems.
Have gnu, will travel.
Jon Bird and Paul Layzell
Bird, Lazyell reference Thompson's work, and show how this kind of hardware development can lead to novel sensors:
IV. UNCONSTRAINED INTRINSIC HARDWARE EVOLUTION
Unconstrained intrinsic HE design usually comprises a computer running an EA and a reconfigurable device, such as an FPGA, on which individual genotypes are instantiated as physical electronic circuits. The fitness of a given circuit is determined solely by its real time behaviour and other factors, such as topology, are not considered. For example, Thompson [9] evolved a circuit on a small corner of a Xilinx XC6216 FPGA that was able to discriminate between two square wave inputs of 1 kHz and 10 kHz without using any of the counters/timers or RC networks that conventional design would require for this task. The evolved circuit contained several continuous-time recurrent loops and the timing mechanism relied on a subtle analogue property - possibly parasitic capacitance - which affected delays in the internal signal paths according to the input frequency [23]. Both the loops and the timing mechanism would have been forbidden under conventional design procedure, but the evolved circuit made more parsimonious use of the silicon.
Unconstrained, intrinsic HE therefore shows potential for the design of analogue dynamical systems that may prove more successful for certain tasks than conventional design. This approach may also lead to the discovery of novel electronic ‘tricks’ not yet exploited by conventional design. Layzell [24] developed the Evolvable Motherboard (EM) to investigate some of the key issues in intrinsic HE, in particular to evaluate the relative merits of different basic components, methods of analysis and interconnection architectures. The next section gives an overview of this testbed and describes an experiment where he intrinsically evolved the first oscillators to reach their target frequency.
Evolution is then free to explore very unusual designs: circuits with structures and intricate dynamical behaviours beyond the scope of conventional design. In unconstrained HE, the circuit primitives do not have their behaviour constrained within specific input and output ranges or by temporal coordination, nor are they restricted to playing specific functional roles. Consequently, the process of unconstrained intrinsic HE is more like tinkering than conventional engineering [10,11] and in some key aspects is analogous to natural evolution.
In particular, this paper details an unconstrained, intrinsic HE experiment where a network of transistors sensed and utilised the radio waves emanating from a nearby PC. Essentially, the EA led to the construction of a radio...
our brains. Depending on your belief system, either
1) Over millions of years our physiology evolved to be resistant to these very recent influences
or
2) The all-powerful being that created everything 6,000 years ago molded the clay used to create man in such a way that there is some as-yet undiscovered shielding to protect our wetware.
To think there is some very subtle affect over time that may be highly dependent on the intensity, proximity, and frequency of these outside fields is, IMO, entirely baseless. Or maybe not.
Performance must be inherent in every aspect of the system. It is not an afterthought, but always thought. - me
I swear, people are so dedicated to perpetuating this stupid myth that consumer electronic devices interfere with our brains
Researchers USE external EM fields as a non-invasive method of testing/altering brain function. Whether consumer electronic devices are powerful enough to alter computation in the brain, I don't know if they have studied that or not, but it is well within the realm of possibility.
Here is just one example of many of EM fields used to study human cognition, in this case it impacted morality:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/bending-morality-magnetism
When the brain processes every possible source of information to its fullest, you have severe autism. The human brain is simply not capable of handling too much information at once, which is why it must be filtered and why it evolved as it has.
As a former autist i disagree with your statement. It's more like when the brain processes one single source of information to it's fullest. Which if you're lucky to have that source be sight or hearing it may lead to a savant ability. Ok, taste too, as most good chefs have higher sensibility than others, but probably not to the extreme where you get disgusted by the taste of iodine in salt
There is no such thing as a "former autist." You may learn to cope and adjust to having new and improved mental habits and responses, but this is not a "cure." It is an adaptation.
First of all, autism isn't something that needs to be cured, that's an NT perception. Autism - NT is a continuum of different ways to perceive. You can learn different ways to perceive and move yourself along the continuum. A large part of yoga, and other eastern traditions, is learning how to gain control over these different ways of perception.
A large part of the problem is that the people defining autism are NT's that only see the exterior behaviours and have no real contact with what is going on inside the person.
Believe me, i used to cope with it and very much know the difference between coping with restrictions and totally removing the restrictions.
n.b. I'm oversimplifying, there's more than one continuum that is in play and not all autists have the same combination of continuums, but the principle remains the same. Once science understands these continuums more (and get's rid of the static object view of the world) they'll be able to see how what our societies (at least western) are demanding from us and teaching us is forcing us more and more towards the Autistic side of these continuums.
"On the other hand, I think your complaints about authorship are out of line. Markram could have committed significant resources to getting the 12-electrode patch setup working (this kind of technique is his specialty), but that wouldn't count under Nat Neuro's list of contributions (it's not 'performing' or 'designing' experiments, e.g.)"
Indeed, Markram has certainly rustled up plenty of money. However, you'll find that the guidelines (they don't belong to Nature Neuroscience) are quite clear that simply providing financial support is NOT a scientific contribution, although this rule is not widely applied. From the same source:
"1.7. “Honorary authorship” is inconsistent with the definition of authorship. An honorary author is any individual listed as an author who has not made a substantive intellectual contribution to the work as defined in section 1.6. Among those who would be considered honorary authors are those whose participation was limited solely to the acquisition of funding for the research;"
The list of contributions is free-form, so "built and designed the set-up" would be perfectly allowable (but it was probably a long-gone post-doc).
I suspect this is exactly the case - that the Universe is a single entity whose gazillion individual parts are all interconnected and endlessly communicating, in much the same way that a beehive contains tens of thousands of individual bees all operating together as a single entity by endlessly communicating. I suspect the human body is the same. I suspect that all the parts of anything we perceive as a single entity are endlessly communicating in ways that we can barely imagine; and that everything we perceive as a single entity is endlessly communicating with other similar parts of a greater whole, that we are equally incapable of imagining.
The physicist Sir James Jeans once described the Universe as "more like a great thought than a great machine", and I suspect he will be proved right.
Live in a tiny little world of trying to understand nature by breaking it down to almost useless levels and this kind of shit would be surprising to you.
If neurons can form fields larger than one neuron, just how big can these fields get? If they can go between some neurons in the same brain, could they send a weak signal to NEARBY brains? If humans had some wireless connection with nearby humans that would have interesting consequences for concepts like intimacy and social dynamics.
Consciousness has possibly just been explained. We knew that there was something 'metaphysical' or 'subjective'. An electric field is not exactly physical or non-physical (imo), but something working completely outside the wiring within our brain. I believe that this new 'information superhighway' that our brains theoretically hold is the explanation as to what cuts us out from simple computers that do narrow calculation. However, I am only referring to the computers which do not take advantage of their own electric field to send more information. I consider those evolutionary algorithms to become 'cognitively conscious', after those 1 million iterations that led to advanced thought and planning for a certain result, as indicated by the achievement of utilizing an electric field. And, being optimistic enough to assume that these electric fields act as mini quantum computers (as was suggested above), we can safely say that communication between neurons is much more vast that we imagined, as is consciousness.
That explains the experience i had in a MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan.
(i was not afraid, claustrophobic or anything)
While the scan was in progress i was unable to keep my eyes still and stop thinking. (If a brain download would ever be possible, it should feel like that.) It felt like i was reasoning, questioning and answering everything at the same time, without any internal conversation. I was barely able to focus on the one task i had in there: simply lay still.
Come to think of it: I can recount exactly two times i felt that way, one being in the toilet adjacent to a (university) lab involving some extreme magnetics, the other after drinking tens of beers of extremely poor quality and inhaling whatever my neighbor had.
We all know at some point the human brain will be able to send it's thoughts, and instead of thinking it's all magic, if we stop for 2 seconds to realize this might be a link to that puzzle, and use science to figure it out....I could see this being the step that shows it really does exist, although tough to implement, if at all possible....at least for now.
It doesn't even need debunking; simple common-sense will do! After all, the more extreme the claim, the easier it is to compare with reality.
"Mobile phone use causes a 0.01%* increase in the chance of certain types of brain cancer over an entire lifetime" would be tricky to prove either way, the effects being almost indistinguishable without careful study over a long period. (* claim entirely made up)
But "mobile phone use kills 50% of users within a year" is clearly loopy — the hundreds of people I know personally who've regularly used mobile phones for several years, all of whom have entirely failed to drop dead, is pretty overwhelming counter-evidence!
In the same way, it's pretty effin' obvious by now that any effects on brain activity from using them, even over many years, must — if they exist at all — be so extremely subtle and hard to spot that they're really not worth wasting time and worry on.
Maybe the interesting question here is why people seem so keen to disregard a lifetime's experience, and disengage all critical thinking, when reading these scare stories...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
"(...) whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory (...)" watch this -> "Sous le feu des Ondes 2009"
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
What? No jokes about stimulation through ephaptic coupling?