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Using Magnets To Turn Off the Brain's Speech Center
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun May 18, 2008 09:19 AM
from the bzzt-ow-bzzt-ow-bzzzzzzzt-owwwwwww dept.
from the bzzt-ow-bzzt-ow-bzzzzzzzt-owwwwwww dept.
An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder). Researchers believe that the ability to stimulate or quell activity in specific areas of the brain may help in treating conditions like epilepsy and migraine headaches.
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My wife (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My wife (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My wife (Score:5, Funny)
Then I won't look so silly in my tin-foil hat, now will I?
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Re:My wife (Score:5, Funny)
Of course you will. But at least nobody will be able to say so.
:)
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Re:My wife (Score:5, Funny)
I now have a mental image of a paranoid nerd tethered to a point like a dog in a yard. Instead of barking at passers by, he babbles about faked moon landings and Monty Python sketches.
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TMS is known for age. (Score:5, Insightful)
- the effects are local. Whereas using electrodes, you basically fry the whole brain.
- much finer tunning : you can slightly increase or dicrease the probability of neurons firing in target area, and have a lot of freedom of controlling how much "slightly".
Their "creativity stimultion application" is probably just shutting down some brain regions and stimulating other to see how this altered state of mind influence creativeness. Actual artists have been doing this for age using marijuanna, LSD, etc... except for *much* *much* *much* cheaper.
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OK, guys. This needs to be explained (Score:5, Funny)
Disrupting the speech centers of the brain does not preempt attempts at communications. And you need communication; it's just that men, left to themselves, would communicate by passing terse status messages: "I'm hungry"; "I'm angry"; "I'm going to sleep"; "I want sex."
Women send the same status messages, but they seem to gain satisfaction out of the process itself. Therefore they send messages in steganographic form: the basis status messages are there, wrapped all kinds of other data which do not require your immediate action. It pays to pay at least some attention; she may start an "I want sex" status message by telling you that her sister's neighbor's aunt is going in for a gall stone operation.
The wise man knows that he should celebrate the differences between the sexes if he wants to celebrate the difference between the sexes.
Therefore, it is best to cultivate the skill of appearing mildly interested and engaged, making reflexive, non-committal listening responses, and paying just enough attention to pick out any cues that indicate something that requires immediate action. It's a lot like driving, actually. You get that sixth sense for when somebody is going to cut you off, or roll into an intersection without coming to a stop. It's not magic, it's practice.
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Re:OK, guys. This needs to be explained (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Similarly, when you and your wife find yourselves with a spare moment, and she starts to talk about your relationship, you find it incredibly boring and turn to the thing you find most interesting: what's on the TV.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
seen the video... (Score:5, Funny)
AMOS Professional, what an oxymoron that was :) (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:seen the video... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny that you mention that. I do TMS research on visual areas and often have participants staring at a CRT screen while we apply TMS. One of the things we have to keep in mind is to time the TMS pulse while the vertical refresh is at the top of the screen, otherwise we get annoying screen artifacts (which look like a horizontal line) caused by the TMS pulse deflecting the beam from the electron gun inside the CRT.
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Thank god for the 1st amendment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thank god for the 1st amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, I didn't know my freedom of speech was *that* valuable... imagine all those expensive high tech gadgets required to silence me...
Seriously, this stupid "what if governments
I mean, you guys need to understand how oppressive governments work. They don't care about you, so they'll just find the least complicated ways to "reform" you. You won't get the privilege to be silenced by these kinds of expensive tech if cutting your tongue or throwing you into prison works better and cheaper. Wake up dudes, you guys have read too much sci-fi.
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Re:Thank god for the 1st amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
What if the government decided to do away with the fourth ammendment and declare it was their right to search and seize simply becuase they're fighting a war against a noun?
What if the government decided to completely ignore the right to legal representation and a free trial because they were holding you in a special, magical place where they decided those rules didn't apply?
What if the government started shipping people off to be tortured by third party nations so they could pretend they weren't doing it themselves.
What if the government wrote a statement that said certain forms of torture was OK, completely refused to list what those forms are, then pretended to be shocked when, exactly as intended, junior troops did what was expected of them?
What if the government could demand your library and bookstore records and had a special way of doing it where, legally, no one was ever allowed to report they'd been demanded, let alone fight the demands?
Or, the classic "crazy" one: What if the government was secretly spying on your phonecalls? Don't tell me there are laws against that. They could do it if they really wanted, right?
You want me to keep going?
The government tends to do the insidious crap because, exactly as they've done with most of the above, they can then deny they're even doing it for several years until the weight of evidence becomes completely overwhelming then they stop that one specific thing and start the next one.
You cut someone's tongue off, you've left a really big piece of physical evidence that sickens and outrages the world.
You toss someone in jail without trial, in normal circumstances, and a lawyer seeking to make a name for themselves is on your ass within months.
Pull the shady crap like suspending habeus corpus and you've got years before they even get it reinstated and can begin trying to get the guy you jailed back out.
Keep shipping him off to Syria or Egypt for "questioning" and you get to torture, whilst claiming innocence, the whole time.
Insidious works far better than blunt.
Continuing the insidious theme:
The British government is having major issues with a cleric they can't deport because he might face torture but who they can't make charges stick on in England.
Blunt option: Jail without trial. They tried that, it caused outrage. They had to release him.
Subtle tinfoil hat option: Zap him with a magnet. "Oh, the poor dear's had a stroke. He can't preach anymore. How awful." Then you take him to a nice secure hospital to protect him from the people who might do him harm and you keep repeating. Problem solved. You're helping him, not harming him.
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So its magnets.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So its magnets.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So its magnets.... (Score:5, Funny)
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I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
I would have to think that it would not take much in the way of forensic aptitude to track down the person(s) manipulating the giant magnetic coil next to the guys head.
And does anyone think that there is something a bit odd about the assistant's name being "Muggleton"?
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I marvel (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder what would happen if the magnetic pulses were applied to more important sections of the brain, such as the area that controls autonomous bodily functions, like the heart. I suppose, if it is capable of knocking out the area of the brain that controls speech, it should be capable of knocking out the section of the brain that controls other, critical bodily functions.
Is it only me, or do you see a potential weapons application for this in the future?
With the proper mastery of magnetism and the human mind, a team could build, in a helmet, an amplifier device that could be used by a trained professional to target individuals precisely, anywhere in the world.
I'd call this contraption... "Cerebro".
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing to know about TMS is that 90-95% of the labs doing research with it use coils which are only capable of stimulating ~1-2cm deep, which is really only useful for hitting cortical areas (or cerebellum). Autonomic functions are controlled by subcortical brain regions, farther away from the scalp. There are a few labs however working with developing things like Deep TMS [medgadget.com] which should hypothetically be able to hit deeper regions, but I've never worked with those systems, so I don't know what sorts of safety measures they take.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
But even worse is
Just imagine how much can specialist at ministry of do with this kind of stuff. Selectivelly disable parts of someone mind
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..........? (silence) (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (silence) (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes (Score:5, Funny)
"turn-off" vs. disrupt (Score:5, Informative)
I can't imagine that this pulse is very good for neuronal tissue in the short-term or long-term.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (Score:4, Informative)
I guess you still shouldn't try it at home, though.
Too late..... (Score:4, Funny)
If only this had been developed 20 years ago, I'd still be married. (I'd have ordered two right off the bat -- one for her and one for her mother.....)
This is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (Score:3, Informative)
Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
TV magnets (Score:3, Funny)
Brain Hacking (Score:5, Interesting)
What I think could also be very interesting is what kinds of background effects do things like the Aurora have on people's brains? I lived in far-north Alaska for many years and I remember that anecdotally everyone talked about strange dreams when the Aurora was active. It could have been merely a sub-conscious suggestion that active Aurora leads to altered dream states or
Re:Brain Hacking (Score:5, Interesting)
There's actually an Australian researcher, Allan Snyder [centreforthemind.com], who uses TMS to try to invoke savant-like symptoms [nytimes.com] in people. The basic idea is that autistic savants are able to do Rainman-like feats like instantaneous counting of scattered matchsticks and photorealistic drawing because their higher-level processing regions are impaired, so that they operate based on lower-level, unfiltered representations. The idea is to see what happens when you try to impair these regions in other people. I should add the caveat though that I'm not aware of other labs which have replicated (or tried to replicate) his results yet, so they should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. From the article:
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people. ...
....
...
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form.
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experim
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Social Engineering...? (Score:5, Funny)
"Using Maggots To Turn Off The Brain's Speech Center"
snatched my Sunday morning mind's attention like a zombie. Litereally. So, is there something here I'm missing? Like how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain, assuming it's not major surgery to introduce them? And why...? Is DARPA going over to the dark side in the fight against terrorists?
Alas, after 15 second of grimacing and beweilderment I realized my sleep-hazed eyes were misreading.
Dang, I hope I didn't give some royalty fee collection company another bad idea to file a patent for...
through the ear canal, of course (Score:5, Funny)
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Mr. Anderson... (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Another cool video (Score:4, Interesting)
EM used before to affect the brain. Not new. (Score:4, Interesting)
Take this story, [scotsman.com] for example. .
It is for these reasons, among others, that I find the whole mass adoption of cell phones and the resulting soup of EM broadcast transmissions in our cities and homes troublesome, and why I find myself sighing at those who insist on repeating the telecommunications corporate propaganda: that non-ionizing radiation is harmless, (which I suppose might be true if one considers mass manipulation of human awareness 'harmless'), that the sun puts out more EM than any man-made device which therefore means that there is nothing to be concerned about, (a silly argument since life IS affected by the white noise from space, but has adapted to deal with it in some interesting ways, as opposed to deliberate coherent signals which affect cells in a variety of reliable and repeatable ways), and that studies on rats don't mean anything because rats != humans, and other such nonsense arguments.
This is just more fodder for the fire. Ignore at your own risk. (And with EM, the more you ignore, the faster and easier it becomes to ignore. Zombie nation.)
-FL
Re:Courage... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Courage... (Score:5, Insightful)
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Be sure to listen for the clicking noise as the limousines drive past.
Hmmm, maybe they could sing?...
Re:Non-ionizing EM (Score:4, Informative)
Keep in mind that a typical TMS coil induces a current in brain neurons by generating a field which goes from 0 to 2 Tesla in about a tenth of a millisecond. Even then, the field is only effective at neural stimulation a centimeter or two away from the coil's focal point. I'm not too familiar with devices which generate non-ionizing EM, but I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find something with those sorts of characteristics.
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Re:This doesn't prove all that much... (Score:5, Informative)
There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything
* more recently, a different type of sham coil [plosone.org] has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)
* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page [wwnorton.com] there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.
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