You know those Jedi toys that you can control with your brain? (OK, technically you control all of your toys with your brain, but bear with me) Using a microchip in a brain implant, a paralyzed man was able to move the fingers of his hand.
Tag Archives: brains
Rats show regret
No, not for the black death. That wasn’t rats fault, it was parasites living on rats. Instead, researchers examined how rats reacted and how they felt after making poor choices. The orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral striatum parts of the brain are used when expressing regret. People with damaged orbitofrontal cortexes don’t experience regret.
The scientists put electrodes in the brains of rats, and ran them through a choice maze. This maze has 4 openings that lead to different kinds of food, some taste, others no so. After choosing a path the rats hear a tone indicates how long they’ll have to wait before getting the food (1 – 45 seconds). They can choose to take another path or stay where they are. If they skip this food, and end up with a worse food (bummer, no chocolate), 2 things happen: the rats look back at the path they were in, and the regret portion of the brain would be used.
What’s more, “just like humans,” says Redish, the rats were more likely to take a “bad deal”—or wait longer than they normally would for their next piece of food—after a regretful decision. The rats would also hastily consume food that stemmed from a bad choice, spending only about five seconds with the treat. Normally the rats would spend about 20 seconds grooming themselves and eating their food.
Deep brain stimulation may one day help restore memories
DARPA is working on brain implants that can help restore memories. This work is aimed at helping soldiers, but it may also work for Alzheimer’s patients. We can already use deep brain stimulation to help reduce tremors in Parkinson’s patients, and help patients with epilepsy. This may help restore more normal brain function in people. But, there are ethical considerations. Changing the way the brain works is changing the very heart of our identity. How much about the person’s personality would be changed?
New neurons may hurt old memories
The brain can make new neurons throughout your life. For a long time it was accepted that you’re born with all the neurons you’ll ever have, but that’s not true. New neurons form mostly in the hippocampus, olfactory bulb, subventricular zone, and possibly in the cerebral cortex.
But all is not rosy with getting new brain cells. It turns out that new neurons in the hippocampus, the main part of the brain associated with memory, disrupt older memories. While the new neurons make it easier to learn new things, they make it harder to remember older things already known.
Octopus arms have minds of their own
It really is true, the brain of an octopus doesn’t directly control the arms. The arms have their own brains, or at least parts of one. The main brain, the one in the mantle, tells the arms what to do, and then the arms themselves take care of the muscles to do it. Kind of like delegation.
3D printed cranial skull
3 months ago, doctors in the Netherlands used 3D printing to replace a woman’s skull. Not the whole skull, just the part around the brain. The unnamed woman had a rare condition that caused her skull to thicken. It had grown thick enough to press on the brain causing loss of vision and harming motor functions. She would have died without this operation.
Doctors have done similar transplants using a material like cement, but it doesn’t fit well. This is the first time a 3D printed prosthetic has been used to replace part of the skull (sorry, second time). After 3 months, the woman’s vision is back, and she’s back to her job. You can hardly tell that she has had the operation. The new skull prosthetic is transparent, but is covered by the woman’s scalp, so she looks normal.
3D printing is becoming more and more useful in medicine. From bone replacement, to custom built guides to help make operations more effective, this technology is helping more and more doctors. Just a couple of years ago these things would have been impossible. We’re living in the future.
Your brain is busy processing things you are never aware of
In an interesting experiment at the University of Arizona, researchers have found that your brain does a lot of processing of visual information, and sees things that your conscious self doesn’t “see”.
When looking at the famous image of a vase that has faces on either side, your bring is doing processing of the negative images in white. They hooked subjects up to an EEG, the researches looked at the brainwaves of the subjects when they were exposed to images of black middle figures (silhouettes) with negative white space on either side, similar to the faces and vase picture. There is an N400 spike when looking at images where there is something in the negative white. That means that 400 ms after the image is shown, the brain shows a negative voltage spike. But it only does this when there is something in the negative white. There is no N400 spike if it’s just a center black object and the sides don’t mean anything.
So the brain is processing the white shapes, but not necessarily passing that on to the consciousness. There are things that your brain senses, but you don’t perceive.
Injured brain’s memories return with music
Researchers have tried playing music to people who have had brain injuries. These people were able to recall new things about their past after listening to the music. These weren’t Alzheimer’s patients. The researchers used top 100 music from each year of the lifetimes of the people. This music seemed to elicit memories of people, or places. They also played music for a control group, and got similar amounts of recollection. More research needs to be done, but it looks like a promising method of restoring the memories of people with brain injuries.