Kevin's Watch

Science wrote: Have you ever wished you could turn up the gain on your brain, getting just a little more juice right before a tough exam or a big experiment? Scientists have now managed such a feat in rats, boosting their performance on a memory test by electrically stimulating a region deep inside their brains. The technique is unlikely to ever be performed on healthy humans, but the researchers say it may prove useful for people who've suffered strokes or other brain injuries.

Deep brain stimulation has been used for years to treat people with Parkinson's disease. More recently, researchers have reported encouraging results for treating depression (Science, 4 March 2005, p. 1405), and just last week a team reported a promising case study in which a man in a minimally conscious state recovered some mobility and responsiveness (ScienceNOW, 16 October). Yet very little is known about how deep brain stimulation works.

That's changing through work on lab animals. A team led by neurologist and neuroscientist Daniel Herrera at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City implanted electrodes into the central thalamus of rats. This brain region is thought to help mediate arousal and is the region surgeons targeted in the minimally conscious patient. After stimulating the rats' central thalamus for 30 minutes, Herrera and colleagues found that two genes--one linked to neural activity and the other linked to cellular mechanisms of learning--had become more active in the rats' brains, including in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. The stimulated rodents also explored more than unstimulated rats did and performed substantially better on an object-recognition test, Herrera and colleagues report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's a significant finding," says Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at New York University. But don't call your neurosurgeon just yet. Herrera cautions that more work is needed to determine how long the benefits last and what the side effects are. Besides, he adds, the ultimate goal isn't to make healthy people smarter, it's to help neurological patients. Those most likely to benefit from the procedure are stroke or head-injury patients, whose brain damage is more stable than that of someone with a progressive disease such as Alzheimer's, Herrera says.

Creator wrote:What will they stimulate next!!

Avatar wrote:Yeah, when I think of electrcity and the brain I automatically think of psycho-surgery...using a filament inserted into the brain to coagulate (fry) little groups of cells in an attempt to control depression/mania/whatever. *shudder*

--A

Principles of Neural Science, the Bible of neural science wrote: The most astonishing example of the modular nature of representational mental processes is the finding that our very sense of ourselves as a self-conscious coherent being - the sum of what we mean when we say "I" - is achieved through the connection of independent circuits, each with its own sense of awareness, that carry out separate operations in our two cerebral hemispheres. The remarkable discovery that even consciousness is not a unitary process was made by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in the course of studying epileptic patients in whom the corpus callosum - the major tract connecting the two hemispheres - was severed as a treatment for epilepsy. Sperry and Gazzaniga found that each hemisphere had a consciousness that was able to function independently of the other. The right hemisphere, which cannot speak, also cannot understand language that is well-understood by the isolated left hemisphere. As a result, opposing commands can be issued by each hemisphere - each hemisphere has a mind of its own! While one patient was holding a favorite book in his left hand, the right hemisphere, which controls the left hand but cannot read, found that simply looking at the book was boring. The right hemisphere commanded the left hand to put the book down! Another patient would put on his clothes with the left hand, while taking them off with the other. Thus in some commissurotomized patients the two hemispheres can even interfere with each other's function.

Aelyria Mireiswen wrote:

Creator wrote:What will they stimulate next!!

You're a naughty man! And don't try to act innocent!

.... ~Lyr

Lyle Watson wrote:If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it