Remote Control for the Brain

What if it were possible to treat brain disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease and other neurological and psychiatric disorders with more efficacy and fewer side effects?  Moreover, what if it this technology were as simple as switching a light on?  If you've suffered from mental illness, I'm sure this sounds too good to be true. Well, not according to Ed Boyden at MIT.

Neurons are themselves electrical devices, and in order to treat brain disorders it is necessary to understand how the elements of a neural circuit work together. It's not as simple as it sounds.

Brain cells in many disorders in the neurological field do not show damage to the individual cell, but an inability for the brain cells to create proper circuit function. Electrical stimulation provokes communication between nerve cells but cannot target specific neural cells. But now systematic analysis of brain circuits is possible. With this new light switch technology, it's possible to make neurons controllable with pulses of colored light. 

In summary, we have identified optogenetic proteins that act as molecular tools to make neurons controllable with pulses of colored light. We are now developing high-count arrays of optical fibers that enable perturbation of activity in distributed and complexly shaped neural circuits, in order to open up systematic analysis of brain circuits. By revealing the neural substrates that can most powerfully control and correct aberrant neural computations, these tools will lead to better therapies for treating brain disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, epilepsy, and Parkinson's disease. New drugs can be generated that target these control circuits but not other unrelated ones, presenting more efficacy and fewer side effects. They may also present new targets for neuromodulation therapies such as deep-brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation. The ability to optically control cells may directly enable a new generation of optical prostheses, which can precisely control aspects of patient physiology using temporally precise pulses of light.

So the channelrhodopsin switch, or light-switch technology, may some day give birth to a treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders that requires only a remote control to function correctly. 

The channelrhodopsin switch is “really going to blow the lid off the whole analysis of brain function,”-- George Augustine, Neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

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List of Unsolved Problems

If you have nothing better to do, you might want to try tackling some of the following unsolved problems in various subjects:













* Unsolved problems in biology
* Unsolved problems in chemistry
* Unsolved problems in cognitive science
* Unsolved problems in computer science
* Unsolved problems in economics
* Unsolved problems in Egyptology
* Unsolved problems in linguistics
* Unsolved problems in mathematics
* Unsolved problems in medicine
* Unsolved problems in neuroscience
* Unsolved problems in philosophy
* Unsolved problems in physics
* Unsolved problems in Sinology

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Hold Hands With Your Spouse!

Washington, Dec 19: A new study has found that all women need to lower their stress levels is a strong and happy marriage.

A team of researchers led by James A. Coan, a University of Virginia neuroscientist has found that women under stress who hold their husbands' hands show signs of immediate relief, which can clearly be seen on their brain scans.

Coan, an assistant professor in the U.Va. Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Department of Psychology, and his team conducted a study involving several couples who rated themselves as highly satisfied with their marriages.

As a part of their study, the researchers designed a functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) study in which 16 married women were subjected to the threat of a very mild electric shock while they by turns held their husband's hand, the hand of a stranger (male) or no hand at all.

They found that the MRI was able to show how these women's brains responded to this handholding while in a threatening situation.

The researchers noted a large decrease in the brain response to threat as a function of spouse handholding, and a limited decrease in this response as a function of stranger handholding.

Moreover, spouse handholding effects varied as a function of marital quality, with women in the very highest quality marriages benefiting from a very powerful decrease in threat-related brain activity, including a strong decrease in the emotional (affective) component of the brain's pain processing circuits.

"This is the first study of the neurological reactions to human touch in a threatening situation, and the first study to measure how the brain facilitates the health-enhancing properties of close social relationships," said Dr. Coan.

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Laughter is Contagious

Laughter is truly contagious, and now, scientists studying how our brain responds to emotive sounds believe they understand why.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London have shown that positive sounds such as laughter or a triumphant "woo hoo!" trigger a response in the listener's brain. This response occurs in the area of the brain that is activated when we smile, as though preparing our facial muscles to laugh. The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Action Medical Research and the Barnwood House Trust, is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Led by Dr Sophie Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, the research team played a series of sounds to volunteers while measuring their brain's response using an fMRI scanner. Some of the sounds were positive, such as laughter or triumph, while others were unpleasant, such as screaming or retching. All of the sounds triggered a response in the volunteer's brain in the premotor cortical region, which prepares the muscles in the face to respond accordingly, though the response was greater for positive sounds, suggesting that these were more contagious than negative sounds. The researchers believe this explains why we respond to laughter or cheering with an involuntary smile.

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