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Brain Electrodes Help Injured Man To Speak Again 88
An anonymous reader writes "A man beaten and left for dead has recovered the power of speech thanks to the use of electrodes to stimulate brain activity. 'Experts called the results encouraging but cautioned that the experimental treatment must be tried in more patients before its value can be assessed. The researchers are already proceeding with a larger study. Before the electrodes were implanted, the man was in what doctors call a "minimally conscious state." That means he showed only occasional awareness of himself and his environment. In a coma or vegetative state, by contrast, patients show no outward signs of awareness.'"
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Mutations in DNA are not responsible for cancer. Cancer is the result of the cellular machinery that regulates mitosis going wonky. The best hypothesis that I have heard is that the telomeres that regulate the number of times a cell can replicate its DNA lose count or go into an endless loop. The DNA itself in a cancerous cell may or not be mutated from the original DNA of the organism, it is not related to the cancer itself. A cell
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If someone is brain dead and nothing, then it doesnt matter, they are zippo , but ultimately, a person by marriage
is at most 25% as important as genetic parents.
Is it possible to form a corporation between your self and parents to give them more rights than your partner?
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Where I find value even in such a life- I spent a year audiotaping my grandmother as she descended through the last stages of Alzheimer's. It's my fear that you have been influenced by bigots- bigots who are no different than the Eugenicists [wikipedia.org] and anti-disability [wikipedia.org] movements of the past.
I understand the fear- the fear of costing your family "more
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All Schiavo had left were lower brain structures that regulate autonomous functions. The autopsy showed that her cortex was gone.
The MRI shows that This Guy's cortex [theregister.co.uk] is also gone. He's even missing those lower brain structures that regulate autonomous functions. Instead, he's got a thin layer of brain tissue on the OUTSIDE of his brain that does it all- and allows him to be a father and a bureaucrat. Of course- it took him 45 years to get there.....
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He wasn't her ex at the time. Also, as legally defined by many societies, the ring takes precedent over blood ties. If you don't agree with that, get a living will before you get your marriage license. Both are legal documents, and this is purely a matter of law. Many people have found more fulfillment in their own nuclear families through marriage than they had through their blood relatives... so it can go either way. There is nothing "tragic" about it.
Regardless, I was still quite disturbed by the whole thing.
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He's advocating execution for a routine act, and then uses character assassination to justify it. He might not be deliberately trolling, but the mods are understandable.
If someone is brain dead and nothing, then it doesn't matter, they are zippo, but ultimately, a person by marriage is at most 25% as important as genetic parents. Is it possible to form a corporation between your self and parents to give them more rights than your partner?
If you don't have a living will,
Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:4, Insightful)
In Schiavo's case, the autopsy was conclusive. Her brain was horribly atrophied; there was little left beyond the brain stem, which only provides the bare minimum life support functions. Parts of her cerebrum had literally turned to mush. No medical treatment, up to and including science fiction ideas like tissue regeneration, could have properly revived her - there was nothing left of her prior self, in terms of the important stuff like memory, or identity.
At best, some techno-magical resurrection, should such a thing be possible one day, could have left her with an blank infant's mind in an already old body, and bluntly, that sounds every bit like a fate worse than death to me.
Really, the only reason why everyone remembers Terri (and not the many other vegetables whose relatives face the difficult choice of either holding out hope indefinitely or pulling the plug) is that her case got political. Medically, she was not out of the ordinary, and it was pretty clear long before the case ever made it to the public eye that she wasn't coming back. People who've lost most of their brain aren't expected to recover, and since their prognosis worsens over time (due to atrophy), there is little chance of medical science yielding some miracle cure that could help them.
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And until recently, that's what "medicine" and "science" thought was the case with the young man in the story.
But now he's up and talking.
Think about it.
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Augmenting a single damaged center of the brain is difficult with the technology of today but not a long-term impossibility.
Completely reconstructing a person's memories and personality when their brain has turned into slurry is
Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:5, Funny)
Possibly the failure of the deep electrical stimulation to elicit the desired response has something to do with the vegetative state of the tomatoes that were used to make the soup. With this in mind, I am going to be conducting further experiments using a crab bisque.
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Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:4, Insightful)
You might want to read up on logic and reasoning and how they are used in debate and discussion because you are making arguments without any basis other than your own beliefs. You are basing your comments on what you want and not on facts or reason.
Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want an analogy, think of a human being as a computer. This guy, in TFA, had a broken sound card - they fixed it. Terri Schiavo had a broken hard drive - one that wasn't just damaged, but was in fact melted. Assuming the damage could have been repaired, what of the data lost? It's not like we had a backup copy of her mind, her memories, or the other aspects of her identity.
There are bound to be cases where we can argue till the cows come home how much of the mind is left. Hers wasn't one of them. Where the forebrain should have been, there was cerebrospinal fluid. There was nothing left. Her case does not compare with the case in TFA.
Now, one day we may be able to repair that kind of damage. But unless we also develop a method for backing up our minds, the way we back up data on a computer, then such a miracle treatment will not restore the patient to who they were.
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If only we could invent a special computer device [wikipedia.org] which allows sensations and higher brain functions to be scanned directly from the brain, recorded, and played back...
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[rant]
It's a sad state when families become politicized such as hers. I understand there was a disagreement, but I don't feel it should have been given the breath and depth of media attention it got. Now, had it been a "special report" type of thing and not involved the 5 o'clock news *every* day that may have been appropriate, but as it turned out no one won, everyone thinks ill of one side of the family or the other, and as a collective whole, we
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Correct, her case more closely mirrors This article from last week [slashdot.org] where a man with a 75 IQ was discovered whose ENTIRE brain was cerebrospinal fluid- except for a thin skin on the surface. Of course, he was given 45 years to recover from his
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No, and why is it that many people automatically assume that "anything is possible" given enough time. People in that type of coma are known to wake up after months, even years, but medicine has not found much in the way of a reliable way to wake them up. He had "moments" where he was consious of his surroundings so the sugreons knew he was capable of responding when they tickled the right neu
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But now he's up and talking.
Think about it.
Should we then freeze dry everyone that dies. you know just in case?
I've had 2 friend that have been in a coma. 1 was thought to have been brain dead and fortunately the doctors were wrong and her mother screaming bloody murder when they pulled her off the respirator (miscommunication due to a language barrier) was the right choice. The choice is there for
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Actually, practitioners of "medicine" thought that if they used "science", they might help the young man. Today he's up and talking solely because of science applied as medicine, not in spite of it.
You should think a bit about the difference between a poor prognosis and a mathematical impossibility. His brain was pretty much still there, just broken, the chances of our figuring out how to fix it w
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Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegative state, from which there is virtually no hope of recovering if it persists for a year or two. The subject of TFA
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Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:5, Informative)
Please read the article next time.
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Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:2)
Re:So what's this mean for Terri Schiavo's doctors (Score:2)
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Wait, I'm confused. Are we talking about an average Microsoft customer, or a mugging victim? (possibly one and the same)
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Thats easy to tell. Notice the chair marks on his forehead. It's Balmer for sure.
Other possible applications of this tech? (Score:4, Interesting)
Medicine is whack. 90% of the time (admittedly bullshit statistic) doctors literally put band-aids on patients, tell them that life is painful, and send them on their way. I used to process medical documents into an EMR system, and although I am not medically trained, the most common solutions to back-pain seemed to be life-style changes, dope (perscription opiates), and invasive (life-threatening) surgery.
I have often wondered if, in the future, it will be possible to get a brain-implant that shuts off offending portions of the CNS. Instead of adjusting the body to deal with mental anguish (pain), why not adjust the body. I'm hoping by the time I need back-surgery for the 2 broken disc that are giving me pain already, it is going to be brain-surgery instead.
Any medical professionals care to share the feasability of brain-implants as a way of treating pain or other conditions not limited to the CNS, as TFA suggests the tech's use is for?
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Excuse me
why not adjust the brain?
Re:Other possible applications of this tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
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IN ADDITION, there are very well documented scientifically done papers that strongly indicated that "my back hurts" is best cured by regular activity with pain management. Lying in bed prolongs the problem, doi
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BTW, although acute pain is indeed a useful signal, the nervous system sometimes goes awry and becomes permanently sensitzed to pain or even sometimes generates pain. In these chronic
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Any medical professionals care to share the feasability of brain-implants as a way of treating pain or other conditions not limited to the CNS, as TFA suggests the tech's use is for?
IINADoctor, but rather I am a patient. I suffer from a condition called essential tremor. In a nutshell it is a kinetic based tremor, where the more precise I attempt to position my hands the more shaky I get (how's that for sucky). Parkinson's, on the other hand, is nearly the opposite, where tremors occur at rest.
Now, to the point. I can be given an implant into the hypo-thalamus(sp?) that when the electrode is active the tremors stop. Or I can be given ablation (burn away part of the thalamus) and t
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Well, we've proven... (Score:3, Funny)
...that it's possible to get a man to start speaking by implanting electrodes.
Now can we develop a cell phone that will implant the electrodes on its own, to get people to stop talking?
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Shows no promise for gameplay
Give me Tic-Tac-Toe
electrodes to the brain (Score:1)
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I hope they find the bastards who beat him (Score:3, Interesting)
Then we could use them as experimental subjects to develop a reliable treatment for others. If the treatment makes them recover, send them to prison for more beatings. Rinse and repeat.
Brain Electrodes Help Injured Man To Speak Again (Score:5, Funny)
The brain as a blackbox (Score:3, Insightful)
But having reading headlines about this story shows how uncomfortable people are with the notion that some part of your brain can be switched off without living you dead, just... different.
shoot me first (Score:2)
Limitations (Score:2, Interesting)
A real world "Terminal Man"? (Score:1)