By Jesse Emspak: Subscribe to Jesse's RSS feed
July 5, 2010 12:18 PM EDT
It's been a staple of science fiction for decades: computer enhanced brains that think faster than their unmodified cousins. A group of Israeli scientists has brought that a little closer, even if only in rats.
Dr. Matti Mintz at Tel Aviv University has inserted small electrodes into the brains of rodents, and used them to decode the kinds of signals from certain parts of the brain. The idea is to use a set of microchips to replace the signals from parts of the brain that have lost function. It won't make you think faster, but it might someday help patients with brain injuries.
Stimulating the brain with electrodes has already been done in patients that are in what is known as a minimally conscious state, in which they can't communicate with anyone else due to damage from a head injury. Called deep brain stimulation, it involves inserting wires directly into the brain. Such stimulation has also been used to treat diseases such as Parkinson's.
Mintz says the difference is that he used the electrodes to find out exactly what kinds of signals were being sent from one part of the rat's brain to another. Once the pattern of electrical firing is known, one could design a chip that would stimulate the brain in a specific way.
"Deep brain stimulation is always on," Mintz said. "It's like a pacemaker, it is always on. But any kind of continuous stimulation will lose its effectiveness after a while." "For instance, we could have a person with Parkinson's and he is asleep; he doesn't need the stimulation then." Refining the signals would allow for better treatment that mimics what the brain actually does more closely.
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Such an electronic stimulus would offer help for people with specific, localized brain injuries, Mintz said, such as strokes, blunt trauma, or the like. It wouldn't work for someone who had been deprived of oxygen, which affects the whole brain.
The next step is to move on to using rabbits, he adds. It will still be some time before chips can be implanted into human brains.
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