![]() ![]() He then closed up the heads of his patients, and they spent several days hanging out in the hospital with electrodes and wires trailing from their heads. Sometimes Fried would also implant thin wires into the same regions of the brain that could detect the activity of the neurons in the neighborhood. When one of the electrodes triggered epilepsy-like firing from the neighboring neurons, he knew he had found the patch of brain that had to be removed. First he would implant electrodes in the brains of his patients, so that he could unleash small bursts of current from them. Fried would sometimes have to perform surgery on people with epilepsy in order to reduce their seizures. The history leading up to this discovery goes back to the 1990s, when Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at UCLA, began to collaborate with neuroscientists who wanted to probe the brain from the inside. In an unprecedented fusion of pop culture and neurosurgery, scientists at Caltech have invented a surreal brain-machine interface. What neurology can do for you (if you’re up for a little invasive brain surgery) is let you use those Gaga and Bieber neurons to control a computer. For now, though, neurology can’t help you. It might be nice to reassign those neurons to loftier thoughts. Several thousand others probably only crackle to the sight of Justin Bieber. Deep in your brain there are probably several thousand neurons that will respond only to the sight of Lady Gaga. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |