MIT Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light

An anonymous reader writes "The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity. "Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease."

There are easier ways

There are easier ways to shut down brain activity. 4chan comes to mind.

Re:There are easier ways

Rule 1 violation.

See also: melanopsin, receptor in human eye, sleep

This fits the discovery by Brainerd in 2001 that the human (and animal) eye has a receptor for blue light that controls the circadian clock.

The cataract surgeons are debating whether it's safer to put in plastic replacement lenses that block blue (to maybe

Who wants to bet...

...that this is actually a plan to invent the Neuralizer from Men in Black?

L.O.O.K.E.R.

Nah. I think they're trying to make the Disco-Hypno gun from Looker [imdb.com]

Ah yes, the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun (Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Energetic Responsers).

Finally!

... a scientific reason why we /.ers should not leave the darkness of our parents' basements and our computer monitors, and continue to avoid the dreaded realm known as "outside".

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... a scientific reason why we /.ers should not leave the darkness of our parents' basements and our computer monitors, and continue to avoid the dreaded realm known as "outside".

You mean that big, blue room?

I dunno about you, but I have problems going in

Slight problem with their idea...

According to the article:

When neurons are engineered to express the halorhodopsin gene, the researchers can inhibit their activity by shining yellow light on them. Light activates the chloride pumps, which drive chloride ions into the neurons, lowering their voltage and silencing their firing.

So, if we genetically engineer some people with Parkinson's or epilepsy to have these halorhodopsin neurons, we can give them a normal life as long as we find a way to shine light directly into their brains?

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So, if we genetically engineer some people with Parkinson's or epilepsy to have these halorhodopsin neurons, we can give them a normal life as long as we find a way to shine light directly into their brains?

I think the article infers that we genetically engineer animals with Parkinson's and Epilepsy having the gene (that is, set up a disease model), then implant LED's into their heads, play with the lights and see what happens, then get a PhD and maybe even

Re:Slight problem with their idea...

No, actually the article directly implies that human treatment will come out of this:

"In the future, controlling the activity patterns of neurons may enable very specific treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases, with few or no side effects," said Edward Boyden, assistant professor

- so this is not just a case of a bad writeup of serious research, or a bad summary on Slashdot. It could be a quote taken out of context, though. In any case, the researchers think this (or something related to it) will be viable eventually, while I, for one, must agree with the grandparent post - how exactly will these light-sensitive chloride pumps get into the brains of already-living sick people?

I assume that the final human treatment, if any is arrived at, will be very different from what they are doing at present. Time will tell. In any case, a very interesting area of research, even if it is hyped a little regarding possible applications.

It's a wetware debugger.

I think the part about controling fits is very vaugue, I read "sponsor bait" or to be more polite speculation. Overall I think TFA gave the impression they are planning to use it to non-invasively investigate "circuits" in the hope of creating a device that can predict and prevent a fit with the minimum of intervention.

The news (to me) in the story is a non-invasive tool that can "flip" individual neurons into a binary on/off state in a controlled manner. I don't know what current "tools" are capable of, nor their level of invasiveness, but it seems to me a wetware debbuging tool such as this could lead to an explosion of knowlage that would make it worthy of a Nobel prize in the not too distant future.

Having said that, AFAIK indivdual neurons are not binary, their activity level is mesured as a "frequency". It would be interesting to know if the neuron's firing frequency can be controlled with more resolution than the simple on/off implied in TFA.

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Yes, both the "on" (channelrhodopsin + blue light) and the "off" (halorhodopsin + yellow light) work on millisecond timescales, just like neurons normally do. The halo paper itself in PLoS one has a great image of being able to assassinate a single spike

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It might be possible to use retroviruses to insert the light-sensitive genes into the patients' cells [wikipedia.org].

does it come in an ale?

The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity.

Well, I guess that's cheaper than alcohol.

Politics

Expect to see a lot of yellow lights at party rallies from now on...

Makes sense

Considering certain patterns of light, as found in some video games, for example, have the ability to bring about seizures and people the suffer from Epilepsy, it makes sanse that certain patterns of light would also be able to reverse that effect.

Re:Makes sense

Considering certain patterns of light, as found in some video games, for example, have the ability to bring about seizures and people the suffer from Epilepsy, it makes sanse that certain patterns of light would also be able to reverse that effect.

Considering certain patterns of falling boulders, as found on some mountains, for example, have the ability to bring death and people the suffer from Epilepsy (sic!). it makes sanse that certain patterns of falling boulders would also be able to reverse that effect.
NOT!

Common sense is not a substitute for knowledge. The two effects are not even related.

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I'm not sure if common sense is a proper name for that, it sounds more like weird cartoon logic to me.

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Considering certain patterns of falling boulders, as found on some mountains, for example, have the ability to bring death and people the suffer from Epilepsy (sic!). it makes sanse that certain patterns of falling boulders would also be able to reverse that effect.

Obviously. It's already been proven in cartoons time and time again that if something falling on your head causes amnesia or a personality change that additional impact to your head will cure it. In the case of personality change you may need to apply su

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Considering certain patterns of light, as found in some video games, for example, have the ability to bring about seizures and people the suffer from Epilepsy, it makes sanse that certain patterns of light would also be able to reverse that effect.

No, tha

Sounds like The Prisoner is coming to life!

As in the '60s British series - they had lights that pulsed over peoples faces to make them do/forget things...

Or Wolfe

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun [amazon.com] had computer monitors could implant an artificial intelligence in anyone who looked at their patterns of swirling colours (as the population in the novels worshipped these artificial intelligences, this was seen as "

Re:Or Wolfe

This is direct exposure, not through the eyes. In addition, the neurons have been altered (an added gene with a photosensitive product) to respond to this treatment.

It's about brain implants for research purposes

Did anyone read TFA? It has nothing to do with light entering the eye and hitting the retina. Forget the strobe lights!

This study is great, because it means we can study animals better. It means researchers will get much more useful information from animal studies (instead of operating on 1000's of rabbits or something, they can do heaps of studies on just one rabbit), which will lead to new and better targets for drug research, better drugs, and perhaps a cure - way down the track.

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"This study is great ... instead of operating on 1000's of rabbits ... they can do heaps of studies on just one rabbit"

Unless you're that one rabbit!

Re:It's about brain implants for research purposes

Did anyone read TFA?

You ain't from round here, are you boy?

Re:

Did any read it? You might better ask: did anyone understand it? Because that doesn't seem to be necessary to get +5 insightful for you comments.

About the interference from previous experiments within the same animal: it depends on what you want to investi

Hooray!

Finally I can get a pair of tinfoil shades to go with my hat.

I, for one...

welcome our new yellow light emitting overlords!

Damn yellowish incandescents.

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light

Yet another reason CFLs are better!

Another ,,,

Another sexist topic about blonde girls !

Requires halorhodopsin gene

According to the article, the yellow light "silences" neurons that have been engineered to include the halorhodopsin gene found in certain bacteria. The light doesn't have the same effect on the neurons that you'd typically find in your skull.

I'm not sure how this would be used clinically to treat epilepsy. Perhaps by introducing the genes into cells in the affected area using a retrovirus?

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Perhaps by introducing the genes into cells in the affected area using a retrovirus?

If you could do that then you could do lots of other useful things. How about engineering neurons to emit photons in the presence of an electric field and using the result

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There has already been an example of successful gene therapy [cincinnatichildrens.org] with retroviruses, and no they didn't get caner, they were cured of cancer.

However the blood-brain barrier is a limitation to brain gene therapy. So in 2003 a UCLA research team inserted genes i

Bah, too slow

There are quicker ways to shut down the brain.

Playing 'Russian Roulette' with a semi-automatic pistol is one idea.

Tin foil glasses

Think of the applications! Time to get a pair of them tin foil glasses to accompany the hat.

Like MIB

nothing was seen here, move along..

belonging

All your neuron are belong to us!

Three memes in one, whee

So to disable the frikkin sharks with lasers, we just have to reverse the polarity of the flux capacitors?!

Great!

Now all we need is a different type of light to activate some people's brains!

If yellow light shuts down brain cells...

Could this explain why when a traffic light turns yellow, nobody seems to notice it?

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If god wanted us to obey traffic lights, he would have written about it in the bible.

The traffic lights are not my gods!

We already knew this

TV has been shutting all of our brains down for decades.

No news to me

This is no news to me. The same thing happens when the light at the office hits my eyes every morning. Almost 0 brain activity.

Old news!

John Carpenter [dailyscript.com] already demonstrated how to shut down brains with light. You just need a shaky grasp of metaphysics, and a very big bomb...

Daggers of the Mind?

I thought Kirk shut down this machine already.

With Light + *Genetic Engineering*

When neurons are engineered to express the halorhodopsin gene, the researchers can inhibit their activity by shining yellow light on them.

So not only would doctors have to get light inside the brain, they'd first have to genetically engineer the neurons to include and express the halorhodopsin gene. The right neurons: the ones that will later have Parkinson's Disease or whatever is being treated.

How are they going to guess which neurons? Which healthy person is going to let them genetically engineer their neurons? Those neurons are going to behave the same, though they're now expressing proteins that make them work like retinal cells?

Installing these shutdown hooks is a neat trick. But not for neurological medicine. Maybe for some biomechanics or biocomputation. Throwing genes into neurons for probing with light so violates our most absolutely personal spaces - inside our craniums and our genomes - that the cure is worse than the disease.

Works on drivers

Yellow light shuts down brain activity in the drivers here in Nevada quite well.

Makes them forget that a yellow light means "go slow", not "go really really really fast".

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Not to mention the fact that most people don't have holes in their head through which sunlight could enter. Although in the case of the OP, I'm not so sure.

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As far as it is possible to make any kind of statement about this, sunlight is white.