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Withered brain cells restored (in monkeys, anyway)
lisa writes "You've heard the old theory that we lose 10,000 neurons a day after the age of 20. Well, that may not be true. Scientists revived and restored aged brain cells thought to be dead in a group of old monkeys. " Interesting-very succesful tests-we'll see how the human trials go.
Does anyone happen to know if there was ever any research done which points towards an atrophy in brain cells caused by Alzheimers as opposed to it simply destroying brain cells?
Perhaps even more fitting for the "Genetic engineering boosts mouse intelligence" story, given that "Algernon" in Flowers for Algernon was the mouse on which they'd done the initial intelligence-boosting experiments, before trying them on the narrator of Flowers for Algernon.
Heh! Young fool!
I've no idea whether there's any truth in the scenario you describe, but I'll tell you one thing for sure: at least some of us do suffer a progressive dulling of the wits during the 10 years following age 25.
It's highly noticeable if one was very bright as a youngster. I'm fairly sure people who were stupid to start with won't notice much of a difference though.
People falling into the latter category won't be reading Slashdot, naturally.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You have gotten the wrong end of the stick wrt how the brain thinks.
To see a comprehensive and truly convincing neuroanatomical theory of how it really works read William H Calvin's "How Brains Think" and "The Cerebral Code".
I promise you will be completely boggled by these books. Nothing I can say in a few words will prepare you for the shock of revelation you will experience. So I won't bother anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Because it's a big risk. Inserting cells producing a nerve growth factor into the skull could cause all sorts of problems with overgrowth of nerve and related tissues - resulting in nasty brain damage or fatality. A particular risk is brain tumors, especially mama/baby tumors where two types of cells, at least one immortalized, manufacture each other's growth factors in a positive feedback loop.
So they'll start with people who are ALREADY having their brains slowly but unstoppably destroyed by another disease process. At worst it will just speed up something that's already happing. At best it might slow, halt, or reverse the disease - perhaps by promoting replacement of the brain tissue as it is destroyed, perhaps by invigorating the existing cells to resist the problem or switching them to a mode where they aren't "yet" susceptable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm sure that we'll be using nanotechnology to help as well. Imagine creating tiny computers that float around in the bloodstream and maybe help clear arteries or repair wounds? It's amazing to think that probably someone reading Slashdot will be involved with this too. Maybe creating the hardware or programming computers to reconnect all of the tiny fibers of the spinal cord. This technology, combined with what's in development now, really has far-reaching implications. Absolutely fascinating.
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
yes- actually that's a really insightful work. Medical health actually does have a very good chance of becoming a VERY important civic virtue in the future- and an aristocracy of medicine is a serious danger to any democratic polity. Niven was indeed quite a bright fellow.
Not really on topic, but if these things increase blood flow, does this mean they might help combat AMS (Altitude sickness)? Or is the general lack of oxygen in the blood at altitude the limiting factor regardless of how fast it's going round the body?
axolotl
I meant in the future silly. Although major kudos for reminding me that monkeys constitute a major socioeconomic group. heh heh.
I take it at least some people here have read Asimov's books about the spacers; basically they got all this tech where they could extend their lives to about 500 years or something; consequently their birth-rate became next to zero so that they didn't run out of living space. But this extended life-span made them paranoid about early death and due to the lack of upcoming young minds with different viewpoints their technological development ground to a halt and they were overtaken by the short-lived earthmen who didn't extend their lives. While the spacers all but died out the earthmen went on to colonise the galaxy.
It seems to me to be a really bad idea to extend life, no matter how attractive it may be for the individual. After all, as far as the species is concerned, death is a pretty healthy part of life.
axolotl
Two words, dude: SPACE COLONIZATION. Space FRIGGING colonization, exploration and industrialization! Hell, with 6+ billon people on this rock, we should have BEEN doing this irregardless of advances in the feild of medicine.
Of course, hypnotism can be a dangerous game. It essentially puts all cognitive functions in bypass mode. If I tell you to bawk like a chicken every time I snapped my fingers and then forget everything I told you, then snapped you out of the hypnosis, you'd bawk every time I snapped my fingers, until I told you what had transpired during the hypnosis.
A better way of enhancing memory is to review perceptics of past memories - the outlay of colors when you were eating breakfast this morning, the feeling of motion the first time you can remember walking through a park, etc. There is a book which is full of such exercies. I used to use it quite a lot, and it helped my memory. If anyone is interested, e-mail doktor1 at earthlink dot net.
As for sleep shutting down cognitive functions: I don't think it does that. Cognitive functions are still used during dreaming, but the inputs to those functions don't come directly from the senses, but from whatever random traffic the brain generates while it "defragments" the day's events, conducting final assimilation on the thousands of minute events of the day. I think it also does some intermediate assimilation on the larger events of the day (for example, attending a meeting concerning the total re-organization of your department, meaning that you don't know WTF your job description is any more... grrrrrr).
Check this out
Although NGF may help in rejuvenating atrophied nerve cells, according to this study, it doesn't help in cases where there is nerve damage (as seems to be assumed by several of the posts).
The study, conducted in people with diabetic peripheral neuropathy, failed to show that Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) could restore function to impaired nerves.
Dorao
http://www.apla.org/apla/positiveliving/0599/ngf.h tml
(forgot to add it)
Dorao
Although quite popular, the idea that people only use 15% (or some similar number) is untrue. If this were true people who suffer partial brain damage at an early age would be able to re-route their synapses and regain full capibilities. Children born with only 20% of their brain matter would be to able to function normaly. I'd love to be able to point to a link on more information but I pulled it all out of a BBC documentary about a neurosurgeon.
With everything that researches are doing, and the RATE at which things are progressing, how old do people think we're going to get, for people currently in their 20's? I have to really sit back, but do I really, REALLY want to live to be 100? 200? 250?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
BTE I think sleep is when the brain shuts down cognative function so that it can go through the sensory "data" collected through the day and stored in short term memory and sort the important stuff into long term memory and dump the crap. Since short term memory is limited in capacity (maybe even rewritable), when it starts to get full we get sleepy. This sorting process is also time consuming hence we sleep 33% of the time.
A study on men's brains showed that men in their 40's are at their mental peak, in terms of overall effectiveness. They don't have the mental flexibility of 20 year olds, but their extreme experience compensates.
Just imagine what it would be like if we had a society of people whose average wisdom was that of a 40 year old, but whose average mental flexibility was that of a 20 year old. The biggest problem we face is that people only have wisdom and intelligence in a fairly short window - 30 to 50 years old. Everyone else is either naive or mentally crippled. Uncrippling the older folks' brains would supercharge our society.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
the person who moderated this down is probably only running how the metamoderation would react to this.. so is xENTROPYy a cmdrtaco in disguise? and by the way: i think what is really offtopic are those meta discussions about how something is moderated good or bad. i wish people would not comment on such things. after all this is why there is meta moderation. meta discusions are offtopic. and of course this as being a meta meta discussion is especially offtopic. but since i do not have enough moderator points to modertate all the people down how whine about how something is moderated bad or good i thought i just jump in the discussion and give my $0.02
Something tells me they aint living much longer -- unless the treatment can restore the brain after it's been cut open & examined.
Alzheimers is a disease caused by Prions, according to my Bio teacher, who studied it for Amgen. Therefore, how could gene therapy have an effect on the condition?
Dr. Strauss sayz I should rite down evrything that happens too me from now on....
--
There is a short story, but the novel is better(the short story basically just cuts out 90% of the book).
It's been coming for a while now; I reckon we're abut ten years away from a practical application.
For more on regeneration, check this out.
True. In fact, studies have shown that regular "exercise" of the brain (doing things like crossword puzzles, etc) can delay the onset of Alzheimer's and other age-related dementia.
Is to revive brain cells that think they themselves are dead. Boy, wouldn't that be a surprise! One minute you're in heaven, the next you're on someone's countertop! I can't help but think of poor Erwin (of Userfriendly) in this context, somehow...
How are the neural grafting ideas coming along? Anyone trying for cyborg tamagochis soon?
This article, and all the others in recent [months|years], are indicating a definite trend toward the day when we can arbitrarily and indefinitely prolong the life of the human brain. Couple this with cloning research and the eventual evolution of nanotechnology (specifically, tiny little machines that we can use to repair damage in a fraction of the time that our body can naturally), and within fifty, maybe sixty years, science will have achieved the ability to make a person effectively immortal -- even if they are already advanced in years. Painless restructuring of an elderly body into a younger, stronger form, and eternal neurons, will allow any human (short of violent trauma or nuclear explosions) to live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years (if you're lucky). Sign me up. :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Gotta disagree with you there. The brain -- the Mother of All Neural Networks -- can store many overlapping patterns and still be able to recall them distinctly. A memory is not stored in a specific place, but instead distributed throughout a web of connections. A single brain cell may be involved with the recollection of many memories.
The ease of recall is determined by the strength of the dendritic connections between the brain cells that make up the pattern -- how strongly the pattern is "burned in". This is the point of rehearsals and rereading important items. With more patterns overlapping, you may be more likely to make connections between seemingly disparate topics, but you should still be able to distinguish them. If two *weak* patterns overlap (items that haven't been recalled in awhile) it might be possible to confuse them.
If the volume of data were primary factor, wouldn't teenagers have better recall than twenty-five year olds? I think we'd all agree that a 25-year old remembers just as well or better than a 16-year old. So why does mental performance decline over time? Well, aren't the late 20's when you are no longer forced to learn new things?
Without anyone forcing you to learn new things, you're on your own. If you keep learning, mental performance should actually improve until serious brain cell degradation sets in -- I guess this is what these researchers are trying to reverse. On the other hand, if you learn nothing new the patterns start to atrophy.
Anyway, that's my $.02, any neuroscientists care to weigh in?
Oh boy, here we go off the deep end. If you clone a body, you have to wait for it to be born and grow. At that point, it is an individual. You can't just murder someone so that you can live longer. You could just teach all you know to the youngster, but we already have a formalized system for that. It's call SCHOOL!
Or what if we could take the heads of dying people (say, heart attack victims who are falling over the edge) and mount them on a rack system. Then we could network them and have a helluva beowulf cluster.
What would be involved in porting Linux to the human mind? Damn, no device drivers! Do you think we could mail-bomb God's email server and convince him to open-source the code to a mouth or eye driver?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I want something now that would restore me to the level of intellectual and learning ability I had when I was 25.
What about desiring to be restored to the learning ability you had when you were a child? You were at your height of information intake!
Insert mind here.
To keep your finger on the pulse of near-term medical advances, check out CenterWatch, a site that tracks current clinical trials of new medical therapies.
is always there and will always be there.
Professional athletes have anabolic steroids, it just took longer to figure out the brain. To bad we let drug tests for employment become commonplace, now they'll know if you had to cheat to be that smart.
+&x
No! I want the brain of a 50 year old and the body of a 20 year old!
support gun control: take guns from cops
when they think of an absolutely amazing idea and their head explodes. I hate it when that happens.
+&x
Of course, that's accepting the premise that intelligence=wisdom. From all my practical experience, that doesn't seem to be true. (look at factions in University faculties, etc, to see what great intelligence is capable of - scary!)
Gets your whole brain && body thang going full time.
Try a 'soft' art like Tai Chi, Shaolin Kung Fu or somesuch, as these tend to be more challenging and engaging for 'thinker types', but still have MORE than enough hardcore physical activity to allow you to get away with mere cogitation alone. The 'soft' arts take longer to learn, but grow WITH you as you age, whereas a 'hard' art, like kickboxing, will give you greater short-term ability to kick butt, but can leave you floundering and possibly wounded as your body ages.
For a REAL challenge, check out Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu for a refreshingly wacky physical and intellectual challenge!
**>>BELCH
Yeah, and now I have to go and wreck things even further by revealing my excitement at the mere thought of a really PHAT BEOWULF CLUSTER of REJUVENATED MONKEY BRAINS!
d00oooo00000oooooooooooo0o0o0o0o0o0o0d!
(You know what? That felt kinda good!)
**>>BELCH
The reason why so many of these hyped up researches never see the light of day is that they're based on the lets-kill-some-animals approach. Consider, these guys couldn't begin to tell you how humans would react to this therapy, based on what a bunch of mute monkeys did. Consider also, they had no idea of what the brains looked like before the treatment. All they had are the cut up brains after the therapy. What if they picked up 4 monkeys that had better brains to begin with? It's almost as bad as that self-aggrandizing I-can-make-life "scientist".
I believe one was elected mayor of Carmel, California and another is touring with Motley Crue. A third went into regression and is now serving time in Folsom Prison for mail fraud.
Just a thought.
An actual count of the cells in the cortex, a key area in the thinking part of the brain, shows that very few cells are lost with age, he said.
So what unfortunate assistant had the job of counting brain cells?
"One million seven hundred thirty seven thousand four hundred and fifty ONE, one million seven hundred thirty seven thousand four hundred and fifty TWO...."
Sure drinking kills brain cells, but only the weak ones.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Now there is some redundancy. You just said what everyone else is saying.
Their non-acceptance is well studied, and generally thought to be a function of user preference. We don't want to have to "get our muff fluffy" every damn time the phone rings, apparently.
onjay
definitively unfluffy
If I do minimal physical activity all day long, I still need sleep. It just gives your head a rest.
Just as many memorable moments happen to those who are educated as to those who are not. Your brain wouldn't fill up quicker just because you can recite poems or other useless junk. Your brain remembers what is wants, not what you want.
Your brain wouldn't fill up if you went to school for 16 years. You probably have trouble remembering 95% of the school experience. Sure you can remember what was taught, but other people still have experiences while you are in school that they would remember.
Use it or lose it.
Atrophy is generally linked to lack of use, and I've heard many times (and seen a few supporting examples) that your mind stays sharp as long as you keep using it, especially for learning. I've also heard that the brain contains stem cells, and can actually grow new neurons if it needs them.
Makes your wonder...
What book are you talking about?
This doesn't regenerate cells, it only revives atrophied cells. If you've had actual physical damage to the grey matter, it's not going to help.
Interestingly, though, there has been work in nerve cell regeration, and I believe it's actually been going places in the last few years. See comments previously for a link, I believe.
Practice survival of the fittest. Kill the week neurons with beer.
Applying this to Alzheimer's patients is a good restriction because otherwise it becomes difficult to discern between playing god and correcting something that has happened to a person due to a dibilitating disease.
Basically, one's "correction" and one's "improvement". I'm all in favor of fixing things that are broken. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Remember, we were all meant to forget for a reason. The mind is selective so that we can make decisions. Too many options is just as paralyzing (if not more) than no options at all.
Gordon
Isn't this somewhat like the premise of the movie Deep Blue Sea? I don't know, maybe I'm just paranoid, but this reminds me of the whole Jurrassic Park, messing with evolution stuff. Something is bound to go wrong, I hope not, but I think the chances of complete success are far smaller than the chances of something going wrong. I just hope that any side effects are caught before it gets to human testing.
This is great news. My pet monkey has
been getting on in years and is no
longer the chess partner he used to be.
Good point. I like the idea that this technology might improve the quality of life for people whose brains give out long before their bodies do.
**>>BELCH
Now that was funny!! Where the hell are the moderators. OH, I forgot..it's bootey kissing time
Congratulation !! ;-)
Your have just argued for your own limitations,
now they are yours.
Within 10 years, we're going to be dealing with moral questions that we never even dreamed of before.
Read Larry Niven's short story, "The Jigsaw Man". Available in the collection "Tales of Known Space", by same. Mr. Niven saw moral problems related to medical advancements like this back in the 1960's.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Indeed.
In fact, given what we're learning about the effects of de-stressing in protecting the brain from excitotoxicity, infection, and cortisol overload, I wouldn't be surprised if moderate marijuana use turned out to be a statistical marker for better brain function.
- laborit
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
As a rebuttle to certain points (Not necessarily because I believe it is so, but just because I don't believe it is):
1. As I noted previously, a hash table has a certain volume up to which collisions are so minimal that there is no performance impact, therefore it may well be that the brain, a product of an evolution during the majority of which a lifespan of 40 years was impressive, has developed a bucket/hash equivalent where it starts getting bad performance from inserts/retrievals around 25/30.
2. As you noted, reinforcement has a great deal to do with it as well, people at 25 have more cross-references to use to support a memory than 16 year olds, plus the fact that 16 year olds are usually swimming in hormones which may well affect certain varieties of memory.
This is not to say that I don't totally agree with you on your picture of the brain, however I see no reason from your arguments that the comparison with a hash table in a simplistic fashion is not valid.
Furthermore, the point I was trying to make in the end is this: I don't believe reviving a bunch of previously dead braincells would achieve anything towards increasing mental performance. The functions and structures of the brain by the time this is relevant are already in place, and the sudden addition of a bunch of braincells would, IMHO, be like malloc()'ing 200kb more space for your hash bucket points, a waste of time at best, since the hash algorithm never goes there anyway.
In a system as complex as the brain, it is quite possible that such a revival would have seriously adverse effects as the new braincells struggle the adjust to the weightings of the network around it, often firing spontaneously where previously there was no fire at all, and in large numbers, this could do extremely weird, if not entirely bad, things.
In the single case of the treatment of certain brain diseases, I believe it may be effective, because entire sections of the brain may die out, and having anything here is better than nothing, but for the case of mental capability, I suspect the technology is of little use.
You can't win a fight.
Ah... I can just see it now. Imagine, if we can someone revive or reactivate dead brain cells, what kind of world would we have?
:)
- Farrah Fawcett would finally get that Nobel Prize for her work on superstring theory that clearly shows the interrelations between the weak force and this year's hemlines.
- AOL becomes the Internet center for reasonable discussion and carefully crafted thought.
- Oprah's latest book club selection: "The Meditations Of Marcus Aurelius".
- Network executives realize their impact on civilization, build an advanced spacecraft, and then hurl themselves into the sun. "Crusade" is renewed for four and half more seasons.
- Cheech & Chong for President!
Let's hope they actually get this work in humans. I recommend that they begin testing immediately. They could begin testing on lawyers - no one will bother to stop them, although one never knows if the data collected from them will be applicable to humans...
No lawyers were harmed in this post. I'll try harder next time.
Artificial Neural Networks (ANN's) can be trained so intensively that they lose their ability to generalize. For example, if you train a network to recognize a photograph of a telephone pole, it should be able to recognize it during differing light conditions, different orientations, etc. An overtrained network will not generalize, but will only recognize a single instance of a telephone pole and ignore all the others.
One way to improve the generalization of neural networks is to feed them a bit of random data every once in a while.
During sleep it appears that random signals are being emitted into the rest of the brain by the brain stem. Sometimes you might be aware of the random signals, and put them into an imaginative framework called a dream. Anway, what do you suppose those random inputs periodically injected into a brain could be doing????
It's all speculation, but still fun to think about.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The costs are gonna be through the roof, though... I'm looking at some new high tech medicine costing around $5000 a dose (for me, 3 doses would last 4-6 months). Everyone, enjoy your health while you still have it.
"Mr. Malda? Your brain cells have been restored, you'll be out of the hospital in a few days! By the way, your insurance company called... They say your 10% of the procedure is going to cost you $324,000..."
Soma thoughts:
1) Smart pills: People are generally non-compliant medicationwise...I see people every day who have (or had) the means to deliver themselves from imminent morbidity/death, but do not. I hesitate to use the term "choose" because they really have the best intentions but their actions belie some lack of will or something. I posit that mere neuronal fluffiness is not motivation enough for anyone to do anything about. It reminds me of the ironic* mope of the Life Extension crowd in the late 80's, "I forgot to take my Hydergine."
2) You can forestall the detriment and up your charm points just by cross training your brain NOW so you have a higher baseline functionality. Remember the awesome global mental shift that occurred when you learned to play chess? Where is the challenge and growth now? Go out there and schmooze and dance and paint and juggle and use that other lobe. At least get so you can memorize 16 digit credit card numbers over people's shoulders.
onjay
(not one of those pi-memorizing MENSA types)
*True irony, not like "rain on your wedding day."
"Scientific discoveries by those under 25."
The conclusion that your declining is wrong in my opinion.
Why do you suppose people under 25 were making those discoveries? Well, you graduate from college at age 21 or 22, then if you do a Masters you'll be 23 to 24 years old after you complete that. So,
by the time you're WELL into your Doctoral research you'll be 25 years old provided you don't slack too much.
Anyway, Doctoral students don't research in a vacuum. They are mentored by OLDER professors who often have long running research programs (that they GUESS WHAT started when they were Doctoral students themselves - heh heh). Anyway, these Older professors say to these Doctoral students "Why don't you take a look at this little gem..." meaning some line of inquiry which the old guy doesn't have time to track down because he's busy with his other work.
In short, the mentor feeds ideas to the young person who is cracking his ass 24 hours a day to get a Doctorate. The old guy is busy thinking a bit, drinking a bit, playing golf, driving kids around, vacationing, sabbaticalling, tenuring, politicking, etc.
If the old guy would put his nose to the grindstone like the young guy he'd make just as many important scientific studies. But it's hard work, and after you've got your tenure...the rest is human nature. Leave a few things for the younger students.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Now is as good a time as any to throw on the table a little hypothesis I've been thinking about.
In all our struggles to understand the brain, I don't think very many have approached it from the following direction: could it be that the patterns we develop in hardware and software are subconsciously based on the way our brain functions? And if so, could we not use our own complex creations to learn more about ourselves?
For example, dead cells reviving sounds similar to garbage collection in Smalltalk and Java. The concepts of input/output, memory, and a central processing unit are all obviously modeled on ourselves. Even packet-based communication is modeled on our own form of speech: instead of attaching a wire to each other's heads, we broadcast a few words and hope they arrive correctly. A conversation is like a TCP/IP connection in that the connection is only perceived.
So, as technology advances and new solutions are discovered, we intuitively better understand ourselves. If the hypothesis is correct, brain research is being indirectly benefitted by the advancement of computer science!
What about all those brain cells of mine
that have quit working (not died)
Due to them giving up trying to work while
I was stoned and tripped out for the last
15 years?? (don't tell me they're dead because they aren't)
Yeah... so I did drugs.... LOTS of drugs....
I also quit drugs (not to mention I started out with waaay more IQ points than the average schmoe)
My brain is beginning to work like it used to (after a year of sobriety) and I'm interested
in wether or not this project (applied to hooomans)
would have any greater benefit? I.E. quicker recovery time.
btw... drugs do have their uses. Reaching ones _higher_ potentials not being one of them.
There are plenty of folks working towards attaining their highest possible level of trailer trashness.
I don't consider that a worthy goal.
AND FOR ALL YOU HIGH SCHOOL KIDS!!!!
STay in school... go to college... get an education,
Prove you can work in a demanding environment... THEN
(if you still feel so inclined... ) Screw it all off with drugs and partying.
Trust me (and this I know) It's much easier to get your education now than it is 15 years down the road.
Laters
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
(See Previous Article) :-)
----
We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
There are many speculative causes and treatments.
So, if you don't agree with something, that makes it flamebait? Only if your infantile enough to flame someone for a well thought-out, intelligent post. Someone please intelligently moderate this post.
Of course Oxygen radicals are one of the prime culprits in aging (but just try to get along without it).
I wonder what affect these have on the rate of protein crosslinkage.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I want something now that would restore me to the level of intellectual and learning ability I had when I was 25. At the time I didn't put it to good use, but now (mhmm hmm years later) I think I could really use some extra brain cycles, plus I would have the wisdom to utilize them in a somewhat more constructive manner.
Seriously, I am wondering why they want to restrict this to alzheimers patients. There is no doubt that our intellectual capacity lessens over time and that we peak in our early twenties. It doesn't mean we get stupid, but we certainly do take a little longer to make connections between things or learn something new. To be able to gain both the wisdom of age and the mental vigor of youth would be truly wonderful!
And besides the above, how far are we from being able to pump up cerebral functioning to new levels? The gene therapy mentioned in the article merely revives new cells. Is there something that could add more? Or that could make the ones we have more effective? Dang it, I wanna be a genius instead of merely bright...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
... it is that you can't finger out why that is redundant...
Artificial neural networks also decline in performance after being overtrained. It may be an overtraining problem. Wouldn't want to count on it. If it is, then the only thing to do might be to find some way to truely expunge the weak memories (and weaken the strong ones), so that new learning could occur. Not a desireable answer, but a possible reason for forgetting.
OTOH, the brain contains a few magnitudes more cells than the little test systems that have been built. Even is some of them are hardwired connections, there is an unmeasured amount of learning capacity present. So one shouldn't jump to premature certainty.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Skin cells were taken from each of the monkeys. Into these cells, the researchers inserted a gene that makes human nerve growth factor, an essential chemical found in the brain. The modified cells were then injected into the forebrain of four of the monkeys. Four others, acting as controls, got injections of skin cells without the NGF gene. Once in the brain, the modified cells began making NGF.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I'm not sure, but I do know that it could make it worse, just due to the fact that the air is severely lacking in oxygen. I know that a year and a half ago, when I occasionaly smoked, I was taking ginko regularly. One weekend I managed to smoke a pack (a lot for me) and I thought my head was going to explode for all of Monday and Tuesday (also a lot for me. I've had approximately 20 headaches my entire life). The gingko turned my body into an efficient carbon monoxide and nicotine delivery device, basically. That was the last time I ever smoked (I still take gingko). So, its possible a similar, but less drastic, effect could happen on a plane.
Excellent.
There's hope for me yet.
But do "revived" brain cells help you do useful things? Or, perhaps, are those simply "idiot" cells that the more advanced brain cells have killed out of mercy? It sure would be disappointing to go get my "brain cell revival" treatment, and find out that those were the brain cells that thought BASIC was cool.
Or maybe those are "evil" cells that want me to kill and devour my roommates?
314-15-9265
How could you tell?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This means that there's hope for me yet! Yippee!!... What was I saying?. . . . .
sure everybody wants to live forever but given the current population explosion does anybody else see why this could be a "Bad Thing" i mean it could be reasonably argued that the earth is overpopulated already. and if people keep being born and suddenly the mortatility rate becomes next to nothing...overpopulation, overcrowding, famine, drought, food riots, soylent green is made from people!!!!
They say those that have full memory of every event in their live are often driven insane by the experience. Me? I thought it was kind of funny.
+&x
www.burntheherb.com
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Is it just me who is getting sick of these?
Slashdot really needs a filter that refuses to post a message about Beowulf Clusters under an article that has _nothing_ to do with them.
IIRC.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
A couple points that interst me:
1. What happens to modified NGF generating cells after the job is done? I wonder if it is regulated. Do they die off? If so, is there a clean up mech. within the brain? (blood brain barrier is almost impervious... although there are studies that show some of the smaller peptids do pass through (e.g. prions).) If not, might they grow like a cancer?(skin cells do multiply quickly)
2. What could be the adverse effects of too much NGF? (having too much of any growth factor that I can recall cause rather severe negative effects.)
With this in mind, couldn't it be more effective to just inject the NGF rather than the cells into the brain? (this way, you can regulate the doses + not worry about the side effects as much).
Over all, I still believe that mastering gene -> protien regulation (where we could reproduce such a thing with cells we create) will be a key to many of the issues. We can generate cells to produce any protein of our liking, but AFAIK no regulation has been mastered. (e.g. CTLs expressing modified TCRs which recognize hiv infected cells, but expression levels not great enough to overwhelm the disease).
Prehaps a receptor for the product that triggers a reaction to turn on another gene, (which produces a protien) that inhibits the the production of the inital product. (enough babbling)
Dorao
for not mentioning bill gates or microsoft in relation to this article.
I guess it was too much to hope for.
Some people here have one tracked minds.
That's easy. You said what you were going to say anyways, so that's redundant. If you had said something other than what you were going to say, it wouldn't have been redundant. Now do you understand?
Drinking doesn't kill brain cells, it merely prunes them. One of my hobbies during college was Brain Cell Topiary, in which the object was to rearrange my neurons into decorative shapes. It is comforting to know that I can hope to escape any detrimental effects of my hobby thanks to modern monkey research.
I'm wondering if this could also help people that have suffered some sort of brain damage due to accidents or something like that. This could be a real break through in areas such as that and well also a great step for the sufferers of Alzheimer's disease. So someday we may be able to say I'm 90 but I've got the brain of a 20 year old!
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
I had always been of the belief that the reason learning ability and linking slows down as one ages is not due to the loss of brain cells as such, but more the fact that you've already got a lot of information stored in there and it takes longer to make leaps and jumps around in it.
For a programming analogy take your average hash table, the first bunch of inserts and recalls are 1 step, because the bucket at the hash point is empty, so its the first reply you get, but as you fill up a hash table, you begin to get collisions, so you have to do step-searches through the buckets, or jump to overflow lists etc, slowing everything down. The hash is more useful because it contains more data, but to get any data out of it takes a longer time, and to insert new data in also takes a longer time.
Admittedly the brain is of a considerably different structure to that of your average hash table, but it seems an appropriate analogy to me.
You can't win a fight.
Are you trying to be an idiot?
I think Gingko Biloba is great for improving your memory, but I keep forgetting to take mine!
(in all seriousness, it does have a rather opressive doseage schedule - 3 pills a day, spaced 8 hours apart. Remember THAT.)
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah, but what he didn't do with it, was that people that live that long can accumulate ridiculous sums of wealth, merely by interest.
With that much money, who needs technological progress? Just buy an army, enslave a race to do all of your inventing and stuff for you.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Ten to one this person hasn't had so much as a whiff of cannabis in his/her life, and just has something against those who may have...
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
I think I'm a clone now -
Hey, I don't like this new body! It's just not right somehow. The hair is different, and IT SMELLS funny!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What if this technology were used with head transplants (reported a week or two or three ago here on Slashdot)? We're one step closer to immortality. Scientists and Doctors would use cloning to create the rest of the body, transplant the head to the new body, and revive dying brain cells. The only technology we're really missing out on now is reconnecting the spinal cord and all the nerves, and I'm sure that will be developing soon enough. It's incredible to think that maybe by the end of my lifetime (I'm 18 now) the technology will exist to extend my life another 80 or 90 or 300 years. I'm sure I speak for a lot of us when I say that I'd love to see what technology develops after my "regular" life span has come to an end. It would be incredible to be able to extend life using this technologies. Incredible.
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
and of course you promptly unused it by posting to the same discussion.
Tan, rested and brain treated. Reagan 2000 !!!
I read a different article about this during my lunch today. In that article they stated that the gene therapy was only intended for alzheimers patients. Of course none of this precludes using it for other purposes in the future, but at the speed new therapies are generally approved I will probably be in the current target group myself before I will get access to the therapy.
Jack
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?