brin blog: current Event 4

Thursday, October 28, 2010

The Power of Thoughts

How cool would it be to be able to control indavidual braincells with only your thoughts? I will tell you it would be really cool, and possible today.

Five years ago, neuroscientist Christ of Koch of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) discovered that a single neuron in the human brain can function much like a sophisticated computer and recognize people, landmarks, and objects, suggesting, sometimes even memories.

In the October a statement was made by Koch (the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural) “individuals can rapidly, consciously, and voluntarily control neurons deep inside their head,.” This was also proven in the UCLA.

The study was conducted on 12 patients at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where Fried directed the Epilepsy Surgery Program. All of the patients suffered from seizures that could not be controlled by medication. To help localize where their seizures were originating in preparation for possible later surgery, the patients were surgically implanted with electrodes deep within the centers of their brains Cerf used these electrodes to record the activity, as indicated by spikes on a computer screen, of individual neurons in parts of the medial temporal. Prior to recording the activity of the neurons, Cerf interviewed each of the patients to learn about their interests. "I wanted to see what they like -- say, the band Guns N' Roses, the TV show House, and the Red Sox," he says. Using that information, he created for each patient a data set of around 100 images reflecting the things he or she cares about.

In conclusion I believe that I have stated enough facts to prove that it can help people with diseases and change the future.