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Researchers Tweak Mouse Neurons To Activate Specific Memories
An anonymous reader writes "According to new study published in Nature (abstract), MIT researchers have figured out how to trigger specific memories in rats by hitting certain neurons with a pulse of light. From the article: 'The researchers first identified a specific set of brain cells in the hippocampus that were active only when a mouse was learning about a new environment. They determined which genes were activated in those cells, and coupled them with the gene for channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), a light-activated protein used in optogenetics. ... The light-activated protein would only be expressed in the neurons involved in experiential learning — an ingenious way to allow for labeling of the physical network of neurons associated with a specific memory engram for a specific experience. Finally, the mice entered an environment and, after a few minutes of exploration, received a mild foot shock, learning to fear the particular environment in which the shock occurred. The brain cells activated during this fear conditioning became tagged with ChR2. Later, when exposed to triggering pulses of light in a completely different environment, the neurons involved in the fear memory switched on — and the mice quickly entered a defensive, immobile crouch.'"
Next up, a vacation without without going anywhere!
I got here through a series of tubes
Your best souvenirs are just a flash of light away. However, you have to accept to be lobotomized and have a laser trigger some cells in your brain, but this is just a detail!
:-)
I rather close my eyes and think about stuff that I can remember. I can even think about stuff that has not happened yet
Didn't RTFA, as usual.
We're not torturing him, we're just shining this light on him.
It's not our fault he's reliving having his arm torn off over and over.
While I have no doubt that some aspiring psychologist and neurosurgeons would work to create a read/write memory machine for the purposes of treating PTSD, (memory can't trigger if the memory is destroyed. Patient lives a happier and more normal life), it would only be a short jump for the tech on say, DARPA's hands, and you have more of a Universal Soldier type situation, and from there, real, genuine thought police.
Personally though, I look at this in the light of yesterday's news about microtubule structures that preserve memories encoded in axons electrochemically, coupled with a photosensitive protien.
Looks to me like the two sets of researchers are exploring differing parts of the same mechanism, and have discovered that their light sensitive protien triggers shaped memory playback in a neuron similarly to the electrical potential it would experience if it was stimulated by another neuron.
If this were coupled with say, genes for OLEDs, then a neural transiever wouldn't need to rely on invasive contact with the brain to interface meaningfully. Exchanged bursts of photons would be sufficient.
With some improvements in organic semiconductor (plastic) tech, it is entirely feasible to imagine somebody having their brains "painted" in the interface layer like spraypaint. (A water permeable photocuring biopolymer. Perhaps something like liquid silk, with a twist. Without being set by light, it biodegrades, limiting the retardation of the method used by the cerebreal spinal fluid for keeping the brain healthy. ) after that, a controled laser aperature draws all the circuits on top of the brain, passively coupling the synthetic with the biological with a tough, durable, and flexible substrate. A blood plasma tap off the corotid artery for a glucose power cell, and an antenna array printed onto the inside of the cranial cap, and you have yourself a programmable organism.
Pure science fiction at this point, but I could clearly see it happening (in at least a lab). The interface would not introduce any contaminating ions into the mix, and wouldn't be directly connected electronically to the brain. All communication would be photonically transmitted, both directions.
Ethics aside, it would make the manchurian candidate frightfully possible to create.
Lenny was not at fault, it was some homeless guy petting you.
I'm sure there are countless politicians with a hard on just thinking about how to use this...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The protein structures behind memory are beginning to be understood:
(Discovery of mBDNF) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3747716.stm
(CaMKII association) http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/25/9170.abstract?sid=e8ce0965-4b50-4ee4-913b-16d422f25230
(RNA handling of the proteins) http://www.newswise.com/articles/making-memories-how-one-protein-does-it
We're now very close to understanding how memories form and are activated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Later, when exposed to triggering pulses of light in a completely different environment, the neurons involved in the fear memory switched on — and the mice quickly entered a defensive, immobile crouch.
This does not sound convincing to me at all - there could be many reasons for the mouse to become defensive, one of the least likely of which is that a specific memory was triggered...
It would be very hard to say that they were re-experiencing that specific memory.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Next there will be weapons created that can literally immobilize you through fear. Funny, is this not exactly what the Scarecrow did in Batman?
Psychologists and patients can get by with VR simulations using a VR glasses and a powerful gaming PC. They just ctrate a game map that resembles the experience that gave the patient PTSD and gradually increase the realism. They can also create regular street scenes with car engines backfiring, motorists yelling, construction workers running machinery and dropping crates. Gradually they desensitize the patients to these stimuli.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I like the way you think. Color outside the box? What box! A technology such as this could have many positive applications as well. Need to learn how to fly a helicopter in an emergency? Flash. Done. It is a good question whether skills can be evoked in the same manner these experimenters have activated memories.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Referring to the 17th-century French philosopher who wrote, "I think, therefore I am," Tonegawa says, "Rene Descartes didn't believe the mind can be studied as a natural science. He was wrong. This experimental method is the ultimate way of demonstrating that mind, like memory recall, is based on changes in matter."
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. The Mind-Body Problem isn't going down quite that easily.
This issue isn't whether the brain participates in mental phenomena (that's been clearly known since the first time a caveman hit another one in the head with a rock), but whether physical processes are sufficient in themselves to capture the range of capabilities of "mind". To support that, one would need to, on some level, show an equivalency of a broad set of mental abstraction to a set of brain processes. That is, basically, to be able to use the abstraction and the supposed brain mapping essentially interchangably for the purposes of description or logic.
Take, say, "freedom", as one of a broad range of "mental entities". It's insufficient to show, say, an EEG representation of a brain with an individual "thinking about freedom", and claim you've captured the content materially. Apart from the difficulties of teasing apart the concept itself from the feelings about it generated in his brain by the concept, his personal mental associations with it, associatable but not definitionally-equivalent memories, etc., which we cannot presently do on at minimum a technological level, there is a bigger issue here of whether this is even theoretically, or logically, possible--ever. Those neurochemical activities occurring when "contemplating freedom", even constraining ourselves to one particular individual, are -not- the same meaning and content as "freedom". If they were, we should be able to interchangeably say, "Ron Paul is for freedom" and "Ron Paul is for..." and hold up an EEG of test subject thinking about freedom, and have these two approaches be equivalent in content for all uses of the concept "freedom" in all contexts of discussion and logical inference. That is the criteria by which one could know they have fully and accurately mapped mental concepts to brain processes. In reality, this example fails right out of the gate, in that we would have, at best, the mapping for one or a few individuals (which, in the distinctions between the individual brains would break equivalence another way...), not something that could answer "point to a complete physical description of the concept 'freedom' as it exists in the world". Thinking of other possible examples of attempts to retain equivalence between the concept and the picture quickly make it clear claiming equivalence would be absurd, e.g. "Would you sacrifice that freedom for a million dollars?". Hence, they are not equivalent, and a physical mapping cannot be claimed for at least a broad class of this type of mental phenomena.
Really, this dilemma has been around for a couple thousand years in philosophy, and not because people didn't understand the brain was associated with mental processes, or had not investigated neurobiology to our current degree of breadth and specificity. The questions the Mind-Body Problem poses are not fundamentally technological and will not be solvable by that means, however headline-grabbing finding another thinking-or-feeling associated process may be for neuroscience. Quite simply--"is associated with", materially in the brain, is not equivalent to "is", conceptually in the mind.
Lest I be accused of worldview bias here, here's a good overview, presented, incidentally, by a Professor of Philosophy who is also quite vocally atheist. Further references from over the last 2000 years of Western Philosophy, forwarded from people of all manner of metaphysical presuppositions, can be googled at will.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This is simply creepy. Yes, there are potentially wonderful applications. There are also potentially horrendous ones. This is creepy.