Slashdot Mirror
Neuroscientists Say They've Found An Entirely New Form of Neural Communication (sciencealert.com)
Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another -- even if they've been surgically severed. The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections. ScienceAlert reports: "We don't know yet the 'So what?' part of this discovery entirely," says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University. "But we do know that this seems to be an entirely new form of communication in the brain, so we are very excited about this." To that end, Durand and his team investigated slow periodic activity in vitro, studying the brain waves in This neural activity can actually be modulated - strengthened or blocked - by applying weak electrical fields and could be an analogue form of another cell communication method, called ephaptic coupling.
The team's most radical finding was that these electrical fields can activate neurons through a complete gap in severed brain tissue, when the two pieces remain in close physical proximity. slices extracted from decapitated mice. What they found was that slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which in turn activate neighboring cells, constituting a form of neural communication without chemical synaptic transmission or gap junctions. "To ensure that the slice was completely cut, the two pieces of tissue were separated and then rejoined while a clear gap was observed under the surgical microscope," the authors explain in their paper. "The slow hippocampal periodic activity could indeed generate an event on the other side of a complete cut through the whole slice." The findings are reported in The Journal of Physiology.
The team's most radical finding was that these electrical fields can activate neurons through a complete gap in severed brain tissue, when the two pieces remain in close physical proximity. slices extracted from decapitated mice. What they found was that slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which in turn activate neighboring cells, constituting a form of neural communication without chemical synaptic transmission or gap junctions. "To ensure that the slice was completely cut, the two pieces of tissue were separated and then rejoined while a clear gap was observed under the surgical microscope," the authors explain in their paper. "The slow hippocampal periodic activity could indeed generate an event on the other side of a complete cut through the whole slice." The findings are reported in The Journal of Physiology.
Its electric fields that can affect other cells in close proximity not connected. Brain WiFi ,not mysterious just took medicine a long time and lots of dead decapitated mice to work out.
Also I wonder how many more orders of magnitude this increases the # of neuron connections in the brain?
So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects... besides just 'heating effects'.
And that means there is a theoretical mechanism for (say) cell phone radiation to cause cancer.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/48/15800
"Thus, the hypothesis that the propagation of neural activity can be carried out solely by electric fields is consistent with experimental data as well as computer simulations. The fact that the speed of the propagation remains constant under different experimental conditions can be explained by the presence of an electric field effect associated with neural firing generated by the network configuration and not by the properties of individual cells. This electrical field effect is revealed when synaptic transmission is blocked and both pathologic and normal propagation can exist simultaneously with field effect governing short range or local propagation, where synaptic transmission may govern long-range propagation and communication."
One of the additions to artificial neural nets to make them more useful but obstensibly less brain-like was to add error methods to backpropogate to (relatively) remote parts of the network. Does this make real neural nets more like artificial neural nets?
It's quite obvious that this is possible.
Basically, every neuron is its own radio station and receiver by the definition of what it means to transmit electrical signals.
And I remember a study where they showed dendrites growing towards other neurons, as if they knew where they were.
So of course my first hypothesis would be, that the dendrites grow along the em fields.
Another interesting idea that I always had, is that there in nothing, per se, speaking against the possibility brain-to-brain communication. ("telepathy")
All it would take, would be a neuron, so sensitive, that ot could trigger on a spike in the surrounding EM field caused by neurons in the other brain that create a field that is different enough from that of normal neurons or other things, so it does not get flooded by its own neighbor neurons. Although that might be useful too.
Ok, I admit it: I just want a neural signal to radio converter implanted, to communicate more complex concepts than mere words and pictures can express! ;)
E.S.P.
Okay, three, but you already knew that, too!
Every electric wire is a EM radio and receiver. Unless shielded. Axons and dendrites are no different there. :)
No need for any quantum tunneling.
Right now you're thinking "der, duh, doi", same as the rest of the libtards who read slashdot.
Woo peddlers are going to love this. Now they are going to say this is proof for telepathy, souls, spells, etc.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another ...
AT&T preemptively brands their phones: "5 EEG"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
i read about this concept many years ago.
i claim that i have some.
can i read minds? no
can i instill thoughts onto others? no
it is like the "am i being looked at"-test
except more like whether someone is thinking about my person and is also in vicinity.
negative thoughts are more noticeable to me than positive ones.
...and 73 new crowdfunding campaign spread accross Kickstarter, Indigogo and the like, wanting to built some weird electro-gizmo, like headbands generating magnetic field to "boost concentration", "optimize sleep", etc.
Hey, let's jump in!
Who's coming with me?
Let's crowdfund the SlashdotBrainBooster(tm)(c) !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This report seems to be rather misleading. We know that nerves (eg synaps) can communicate by low frequencies (eg DC and VLF), so cutting the brain matter, then re-joining it should still allow conduction. No surprise there.
Broken sentences, sentences without capitalization, a garbled mess.... Do the /. editors actually read what they post?
-- Cheers!
The same as we explain assholes like you.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
They said that this was happening about 100 years ago, but nobody was able to isolate it until now.
The big news here is that the tinfoil hat crowd was right after all. This is sort of amazing. While it was always plausible that sufficiently strong EM waves might disrupt conventional eired neural connections there wasn't a known mechanism by which weak EM waves would be harmful.
Now there is a very clearly plausible way weak EM waves might distrup parts of ones neural activity without disruption other parts making it very hard to actually measure the effect. THat is presumably these severed neuron coupling systems are varied from person to person so the effects would be diffuse and variable and subtle.
I can't think, the neighbors Wifi is melting my brain. Better put on my reynolds brand thinking cap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
... "inductive reasoning"?
Have gnu, will travel.
Finally we know how NPC SJWs work.
So potentially we can affect the operation of peoples' brains using electric fields?
I never understood what is so woo about telepathy. We already have telepathy (mind to mind idea transfer) that is transferred via modulated sound pressure propagation - aka speaking.
Could this phenomena explain the lack of split consciousness after one undergoes Corpus callosotomy?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
I remember an article possibly more than 10 years ago where they already demonstrated external neural communication. They observed scientifically that neurological communication in the human brain can occur faster than the physical speed limit of organic neurological nerve impulses.
I believe that the used functional MRI to demonstrate the effect. They theorized that the brain uses the electromagnet field it generated around the skull to transmit important messages that need to move faster than organically possible.
This study demonstrates that it can occur at a much smaller level too.
Is it possible that this new form of neural communication could be received by another person? Maybe they are really on to something.