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.
I'm not so sure brain communications are responsible for cancer. Could have sworn it was DNA mutations...
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.
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. . . .
So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects... besides just 'heating effects'.
Like to the center line of a fish such as sharks that feel the weak EM fields of the activated muscles of their pray over a short distance.
Non sequitur? How do you jump from potential communication to causing cancer?
Ezekiel 23:20
You'll get modded down for that but yes, it is a thing. Like everythigng in life not everyone is necessarily susceptable in the same way. I don't have an answer for why but something I learned as teen was that wireless made my head hurt. That doesn't mean all access points are bad but I can tell when I'm near a transmitter. The more power, the more the effect. WIreless access points don't bother me unless I'm physically near them. Cell and commercial two-way radio towers tend to be weak enough erp that they don't cause a problem either. They also have height which seems to help as directional / sector panels are more of an issue when I close to them.
We're not alone but there are enough people who come off as lunatics that it doesn't help. Maybe we have smaller skulls or lack some layer of skin everyone else has. CBC Marketplace did a very good story on it last year(?) where they went to one of the labs that actually certifies phones.
...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 ]
No, it is Low Frequency (eg DC) currents in the brain, not RF (Radio Frequency) currents induced from outside.
It has been long known that nerves can only respond to quite low frequencies (eg audio).
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.
Wow that's got to be a world record attempt at a logical jump. You could become the Evil Knievel of pseudo science if you keep that up!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
So potentially we can affect the operation of peoples' brains using electric fields?
This whole article is prime fodder for the wing nuts. I'm just waiting for it to hit the "true believer" communities as a possible explanation for telepathy.
You read my mind!
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...
So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects ...That means there is a theoretical mechanism for (say) cell phone radiation to cause cancer.
You conflate "effect" with "causing an unintended chemical reaction". There is a partial answer from quantum mechanics. You seem to propose that cell phone electromagnetic radiation can cause unintended chemical reactions in organic molecules. This requires exciting electrons so that they move to higher energy molecular orbitals. If the energy is higher than the activation energy, then a molecule may dissociate or otherwise change state in without being catalyzed in the usual controlled way by an enzyme.
As you know, this depends only on the frequency of the electromagnetic energy, not the density (Einstein got a Nobel prize for explaining this.) The problem with your argument is the energy scale: cell phone radiation is in the neighbourhood of 10^-5 ev while organic activation energies are in the region of 1 ev. Note that deep UV does invade this range and x-rays are well above it, the latter being a well known carcinogen. Cell phone radio waves are not like that.
I am hardly qualified as either a physicist or an organic chemist, however these principles are easy enough for a layman to grasp. If you plan to go on worrying about the organic effects of cell phone radiation, at least be armed with some of the well understood underlying principles.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Another problem with your argument is the extreme gap between these .5 Hz waves and ~2 GHz cell phone frequency, ten orders of magnitude. These brain waves are not electromagnetic in nature at all, rather they propagate by electrostatic coupling. There is no relationship with cell phone radiation other than that both involve photons.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Is it possible that this new form of neural communication could be received by another person? Maybe they are really on to something.