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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?
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. . . .
...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!
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.