Mad Neuroscience world

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Over in the mad science world at Stanford...It’s just for animals, right?

Researchers control brain circuits from a distance using infrared light

Now, scientists at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University have developed the first non-invasive technique for controlling targeted brain circuits in behaving animals from a distance. The tool has the potential to solve one of the biggest unmet needs in neuroscience: a way to flexibly test the functions of particular brain cells and circuits deep in the brain during normal behavior — such as mice freely socializing with one another.

The newly published technique builds on the foundation laid down by optogenetics, a technique first developed at Stanford by Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate Karl Deisseroth and collaborators that introduces light-sensitive algal proteins into neurons to let researchers turn them on or off in response to different colors of light.

“Optogenetics has been a transformative tool in neuroscience, but there are limitations on what can be done with existing techniques — in part due to their reliance on light in the visible spectrum,” Hong said. “The brain is quite opaque to visible light, so getting the light to the cells you want to stimulate typically requires invasive optical implants that can cause tissue damage and skull-mounted fiber optic tethers that make it hard to study many kinds of natural behavior.”

Thinking as a materials scientist about ways to overcome these challenges, Hong recognized that biological tissues — including the brain and even the skull — are essentially transparent to infrared light, which could make it possible to deliver the light much deeper into the brain.

...
Hong’s team first demonstrated their technique by adding TRPV1 channels to neurons on one side of mouse motor cortex — a region that orchestrates body movements — and injecting MINDS molecules into the same region. At first the mice explored their enclosures at random, but when the researchers flipped on an infrared light over the enclosure, the mice immediately started walking in circles, driven by the one-sided stimulation of their motor cortex.

“That was a great moment when we knew this was going to work,” Hong said. “Of course it was only the beginning of validating and testing what this technology could do, but from that point on I was confident we had something.”

For example, Hong and colleagues are also developing nanoscopic beads that can convert focused beams of ultrasound into light, and which can be injected directly into the bloodstream, making it possible to optogenetically target cells anywhere in the brain and to change this targeting at will within a single experiment.

[Ninurta]

Just think - someone, somewhere, is giving these morons grant money to research crazy non-starter shit like this.

I bet it's your tax dollars hard at work.

.

[Brotherman]

Is there a medical benefit to this research? Or is this more mind fucking experiments? Pretty soon with the flip of a switch you will vaccinate your self, commit a horrible crime against your will and/ or off yourself at the whim of another psychopath.