The “sewing machine” for minimally invasive neural recording
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
Still, it's nice to see some innovation that might eventually work in large animals and humans, instead of yet another thing that only works in transgenic mice.
Still, a lot of our problems haven't been brain-related; instead, there's an infection or mechanical damage to the connector pedestal/wire bundle. I'm not sure that the sewing machine by itself will be able to sidestep those sorts of problems.
I would be very happy to see better alternatives. I'm just not ready to switch based on this.
Some labs/surgeons/methods have better success than others.
The big thing the sewing machine will do is (likely) reduce mechanical strain at the tissue-electrode interface and hopefully improve upon those handful of failures due to scar tissue encapsulation.
Looks cool on paper, but they will have to find an alternative route to make it stick (no pun intended).
Their paper's title is kind of clickbait. This isn't minimally invasive -- it might be a bit less invasive than other methods, but it's still considered an invasive interface.
Why exactly is this necessary? Does this fulfill an existing need or does it require a few decades of dystopia before reaching maturity?
The brain contains about 86B neurons, which use chemical and electrical signals to process information. Neuroscientists want to know what these cells are doing in healthy brains, and how that processing and signalling goes wrong in diseases. One way--arguably the best way--to do this is to implant animals with electrodes that record activity of nearby neurons, and see how it varies during different conditions (different behaviors, sensory inputs, drug treatments, etc). For obvious reasons, this should be as humane and non-invasive as possible, thus...this.
Humans also occasionally get electrodes implanted, either for deep brain stimulation (the most effective treatment for Parkinson's Disease) or to find the source (focus) of epileptic activity in the brain. This could potentially help with that too, though the deep brain targets are much, much further into the brain than the results reported here.
Exactly! And thank you, nice summary.
It should be noted, with respect to other comments here as well, that in animals the cranial vault re-closes 4-8 weeks after a craniotomy/craniectomy (rats). Dead neurons basically never grow back. Hence 'minimally invasive' refers to the attempt to minimize the brain insult and injury.
I would bet at least some coinage that some or another branch of intelligence networks is already testing this stufff on people who have essentially been disappeared. If they are outright stealing the kidneys of falun gong people, what human sacrifice would china not make to be able to stick a fork in someone's mind and read it?
And if CHINA is doing it, well then everybody else has to keep up!
Good times.
It's bizarre to me that anyone could write an article about this subject and not talk about the mother of all interrogation tools.
We need to defend the right to have an independent mind. If there are black sites and disappeared people, and the spy agencies can pretty much all go hog wild at the moment, where is the governing body that is going to potentially threaten spooks from abusing people horrifically with this stuff?
As I understand it, 5g will have enough bandwidth to have a decent throughput to fingernail sized devices. With a few electrodes could they outright puppet someone?
Why do so few tech articles ever talk about human rights and hype things without even basic analysis? Or it's the same, 'some critics say, it might be bad. oh well.'
And every time, 5 years later, 'oh it turns out google maps actually made a database of everyone's location who used it and then lied about doing that until it was no longer possible. Our motto is don't be evil. Well, not anymore. We don't have to do this interview. GUARDS!'