It seems that every single day scientists make a breakthrough that seems impossible. For people who have to deal with the loss of a sense, such as sight, hearing, or touch, this recent breakthrough may prove to be especially exciting.
Brain in Human[/caption] The Independent reports that neurologists have made a tremendous advance in undoing the loss of senses in some people. Using what has become referred to as a ‘holographic brain modulator’, scientists have crafted for themselves the ability to target sensory receptors in the body with encoded hologram stimuli that reportedly mimics that of real external forces like light and the contact of objects on someone’s skin.
The Independent reports that the modulator is still in the prototype phase, but the positive results from tests have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. “This is one of the first steps in a long road to develop a technology that could be a virtual brain implant with additional senses or enhanced senses,” said Dr Alan Mardinly, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who participated in the work. What makes the research so exciting to those involved is that for the first time they have the ability to target specific neurons and essentially program them to process the holographic stimuli, a process called optogenetics.
Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Tests on mice have given neurologists hope that those with disabilities may receive corrective therapy or comparable assistance one day soon. “The ability to talk to the brain has the incredible potential to help compensate for neurological damage caused by degenerative diseases or injury,” said Professor Ehud Isacoff, another Berkeley scientist who was not involved in the project. “By encoding perceptions into the human cortex, you could allow the blind to see or the paralysed to feel touch.”
“The major advance is the ability to control neurons precisely in space and time,” said Dr Nicolas Pegard, an optics researcher at Berkeley and one of the study’s first authors. “In other words, to shoot the very specific sets of neurons you want to activate and do it at the characteristic scale and the speed at which they normally work.” A competing aspect of the research looks to program not only sets of neurons but regions of the brain to reproduce authentic-feeling sensations when holographic stimuli are used.
Pixabay[/caption] Dr Mardinly added: “This is the culmination of technologies that researchers have been working on for a while but have been impossible to put together. We solved numerous technical problems at the same time to bring it all together and finally realise the potential of this technology.” With such scientific power, however, comes the ever-real threat of misuse by government forces. Just last week and investigative journalist ‘accidentally’ received documentation in a FOIA request that laid out the efforts of the American government to perfect its ‘remote mind control’ abilities that began back in the 1970s.