Research Finds That Electric Fields Help Neurons Fire 287
An anonymous reader writes "'[T]he brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. ... New work ... suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication. "In other words," says Anastassiou, the lead author of a paper about the work appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience (abstract), "while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior," even though the neurons are not physically connected—a phenomenon known as ephaptic (or field) coupling. "So far, neural communication has been thought to occur almost entirely via traffic involving synapses, the junctions where one neuron connects to the next one. Our work suggests an additional means of neural communication through the extracellular space independent of synapses."' If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought — and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory. This is truly paradigm-busting work."
It sounds like (Score:3)
Re:It sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Or this could all be counted as interference that neurons though out all species have been fighting to over come, and hence make the job of coding AI easier relative to how the brains works.
Re:It sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
If natural evolution wasn't able to perform a similar trick with the nervous system given around half a billion years to play with i'd be rather surprised.
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I think I remember this. I had to FPGA chips where there were adjacent gates enabled but not directly connected. However when the researchers disabled those gates, the chips failed to function correctly.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/12/29/007258/Evolutionary-Computing-Via-FPGAs
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A evolutionary program at first shotgunning until results appeared, then tuned the FPGA to refine the pseudo-random / directed
programming fed to the gate array, From what I had read, The guidance program had no knowledge of the underlying architecture
If the FPGA returned anything that agreed with the expected results, That programming was used for further iteration
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Your intuition is not a data source.
Nature does not produce all possible phenotypes, and she would have no tools to take advantage of these "quantum effects" in any case because biology is built on proteins far too large and hot to have "quantum" behavior. It's not even a given that "quantum" effects would actually be more evolutionarily fit.
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Actually that is not even probably true. Quantum effects such as tunneling may indeed have a significant impact on neural activity, and it's not the size of the proteins that would impact such selection, but the distances between synapses and the the possible effect that astrocytes and their proximity to neurons may have on various neural activity.
This entire area of discussion points out to an incredibly interesting aspect of the brain and its relationship to both the space it occupies and the space surrou
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I remain skeptical. I'm open to the idea, but I need evidence --- or more specifically, a neural phenomenon that can't be explained using classical physicals, and for which there is a compelling explanat
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Zener and tunnel diodes depend on silicon doping for their operation. Semiconductors do not appear in biological systems. The diodes themselves may be macroscopic, but the junctions inside are on the Angstrom scale.
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There was once an experiment where electronic circuit researchers did an experiment with genetic algorithms to see if evolution could come up with a better design that humans could. They set their design system to randomly arrange components and wires, run some simulation/crosstalk interference tests, and modify the most successful designs. Eventually after about a day, the system came up with a design that matched the specification. But to their surprise, half the circuit wasn't connected. Nevertheless, th
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It is well understood that neurons use electric fields to operate. Its just that it works over small distances. Advanced EEGs can be used to detect the signals but to understand the information being conveyed we would have to be able to tell the difference between adjacent synapses on individual neurons, do it for all the other neurons too. Thats not so easy.
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are we looking at a different angle on the "EM emissions are harmful" debate?
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Potentially, yes. It's way too early to even guess how likely it is that any given EM through the head could cause a subtle deficit, but this research does suggest a potential mechanism for harm.
Re:It sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
This might push back the goalposts for the AI researchers.
AI != brain simulation. The stock markets run on AI. Cars and airplanes run on AI.
There is something known as the AI Effect [wikipedia.org] which tends to prevent us from recognizing applications of artificial intelligence as actual examples of AI, but, looking closely, you see that AI has little to do with the way the human brain works.
...In fact, that is kind of the "magic" of AI. It is an alien intelligence--at least to our way of thinking. So this discovery may be a major hurdle for those attempting to simulate or emulate a human brain, but the ever-progressing field of Artificial Intelligence cares little for such things.
Re:It sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
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It is possible the OP meant strong AI, or artificial mind. When anyone who doesn't really understand all AI is and its limits considers it, seems to me they really mean artificial mind, a computer or hw/sw combonation that has consciousness, especially self-awareness and other human-like brain states.
Artificial, computer mind/consciousness is not really possible [wikipedia.org], but that doesn't stop laymen from believing it is, nor does it matter (nor should it) to true AI researchers and computer and cognitive scien
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The Chinese room experiment does not demonstrate what you think it does. Serle's argument is (being generous) circular. If the set of rules the man implements is sufficiently nuanced, then the entire *system* is intelligent. There is nothing distinct about a "mind" aside from a set of rules for symbolic information processing.
I particularly liked this reply, from the article:
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Serle's argument is (being generous) circular.
WOW -- you REALLY don't understand Searl.
Granted, not many lay-people do -- and the Chinese Room is certainly one of his most misunderstood ideas -- but I've never seen anyone as completely off as you appear to be.
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Care to offer an explanation, or would you rather just be obliquely smug?
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Care to offer an explanation, or would you rather just be obliquely smug?
If I can offer an analogy, it's as though you've confused a hamburger with Freudian Psychology.
I doubt I can explain where you've erred without a more detailed account of how you came to your conclusion. Though I'd be glad to go over the argument with you, starting with your understanding.
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No, GPP understands it just fine. Searle is assuming what he's trying to prove, and building an elaborate philosophical construct around that assumption which -- surprise! -- proves his assumptions. IOW, it is exactly a circular argument, no different from millennia of sophisticated theological arguments which "prove" the existence of God based on the assumption that God exists. And your claim that "I've never seen anyone as completely off as you appear to be" is either a lie or a statement of extreme ig
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Searle is assuming what he's trying to prove, and building an elaborate philosophical construct around that assumption which -- surprise! -- proves his assumptions.
Searle does no such thing! I invite you to provide evidence for your ridiculous claim.
the circularity of the Chinese Room argument has been pointed out many times by many people, many of them cited in the very article you link to.
I linked to no article. As for your claim that CR is circular, I defy you to point to a single scholarly source.
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I invite you to provide evidence for your ridiculous claim.
It's hard to provide evidence when you're dealing with a thought experiment (so-called; thought experiments in philosophy are very different from thought experiments in science) which is completely evidence-free to begin with. But I'll state the assumption he's making: "There are qualities called 'understanding' and 'intentionality' which humans can possess but machines cannot." That's it, that's the whole argument, right there, and all the elaborations Searle and others have piled on it derive from this
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Actually the Chinese Room thought experiment says nothing about the possibility of artificial sentience, only that we will have a hard time effectively defining and measuring it. A completely different thought experiment goes as follows. A perfect artificial neuron is constructed as well as a means to produce them in vivo (ie. in your living brain.) A process begins that replaces all your neurons with perfect neural emulators. Neuron by neuron your brain is being replaced with a completely difference but to
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What's even more interesting is that if these artificial neurons can exist easily outside of the human cranial "Wet-Space", then you brain can be augmented, duplicated, backed-up, transmitted over distance, and visualized.
This depends on whether the brain state can be defined entirely by classical state. If the brain makes use of or is influenced by quantum state, you cannot duplicate it and a visualization will lack some information. You can still transmit the state over distance.
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Actually the Chinese Room thought experiment says nothing about the possibility of artificial sentience, only that we will have a hard time effectively defining and measuring it.
Not even close. I'm going to guess that you have no more than a passing familiarity with Searle's argument.
Go do some reading and you'll discover how unimaginably wrong your statement is.
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When anyone who doesn't really understand all AI is and its limits considers it, seems to me they really mean artificial mind, a computer or hw/sw combonation that has consciousness, especially self-awareness and other human-like brain states.
This confusion comes from a shift in the meaning of Artificial Intelligence. There was a time when Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence where different subjects. Some where along the way Expert System designers felt it would reflect better on them if they referred to their work as Artificial Intelligence, so Expert Systems became a sub category of AI. I'm not going to weigh in on wether or not Expert Systems are a sub category of AI, just saying that this is where the confusion comes from.
And just
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That argument assumes that humans are more than a self-modifying horribly large Chinese box. The rules in question would probably be very complex statistical learning machines but that's details.
I don't see why we're anything more than that personally.
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Who works on Artificial Brain then? Don't say AI researchers.
These guys [bluebrain.epfl.ch]
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading an article about a guy who was doing genetic algorithms with Xilinx chips, training them to recognize the words "stop" and "go" and set a line low or high accordingly. I can't find the article right now but I'll put in a better search later.
What he'd do is to say the word "stop" or "go" into a microphone and see what the circuit did. The genetic code was the array file input into the Xilinx chips, a string of binary data that his genetic routine would judge for fitness, splice, and retry.
He did several generations and eventually got a good working circuit. A series of ones and zeroes that recognized the words. It worked.
So he loaded the binary files into another board and it didn't work. Why? The genetic algorithm didn't view the circuits as digital. It was utilizing the gates as analog entities, each with it's unique characteristics to get the job done. When you move the code to another board it simply wouldn't work. There was more communication going on than the researcher's original notion imagined. He thought this was a binary exercise. Instead it turned out to be a subtle matter involving the shape of the response curves coming out of unique parts and electromagnetic field interaction. Nature didn't view this circuit as digital, it was more complex than that.
This article reminded me of that.
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Ah, found some info on it I think. [discovermagazine.com]
Cars don't have legs (Score:2)
Creating something that works like the brain does not mean simulating how the brain works. Cars don't have legs, yet they perform the same function as horses.
I think it's funny how so many people believe that we will never be able to emulate the brain's functions because the brain seems to be so complex. Don't they realize that you can build complex things out of simple elements?
The whole English literature is an arrangement of twenty six letters and some punctuation symbols, think of that.
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... I'm typing this wirelessly over teathered Internet access from my steering-velcrod iP **carrier lost**
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Had me going right up to **carrier lost**
nice
i just took my headphones off (Score:3)
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what sort of electric field would having a set of headphones on generate?
According to my observations, the sort that damps neural activity.
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Depends on the efficiency. Ideally all of the energy would be turned into mechanical work.
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I think just the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
The brain is a noisy thing. Neural pathways are prone to error and so there are many for any given purpose processing the signals numerous times to ensure accuracy by aggregate measure. Low power devices find it difficult to maintain accurate signals and the brain is no exception. Signal redundancy and repetition would seem to be measures of compensation for the noisy environment that is the brain.
That electrical signals affect one another due to magnetic flux is nothing new. That the brain operates at low power and low signal requirements would seem to be factors that make it all seem possible in spite of all the noise that goes in on the brain.
I doubt seriously that the brain USES this type of signal processing and more likely that this is the type of thing that its redundancy systems are seeking to filter out. It also seems more likely to me that this is a source of hindrance to the brain rather than an enabler of its function. This could, however, serve to explain how seemingly disparate functions, senses and memories can be connected.
Re:I think just the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
>>I doubt seriously that the brain USES this type of signal processing and more likely that this is the type of thing that its redundancy systems are seeking to filter out.
Don't make that claim unless you have evidence for it - you might be surprised.
In the neural circuits of crayfish, they actually work better with a certain amount of noise in the environment. It's a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance) which comes up in a lot of signal processing situations. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was happening in our brains.
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In fact it does. There is a device you can put in a person's shoe that emits a vibration. If this person has had a stroke or other neurological damage and because of that injury suffers from weakness or palsy, the introduction of this device returns a significant amount of the ability to walk normally. It would seem that Stochastic Resonance is a very important aspect of human neurological function.
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I think he meant use as in active information transfer. Which I also doubt the brain does; this is a noisy, largely stationary background signal that isn't really able to carry any detailed meaning. Just as for crayfish (good example), our networks have evolved to work best in its presence, but that doesn't mean we actively make use of it in any positive way.
Re:I think just the opposite ... and are misguided (Score:2)
I remember being at a Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2002 and be told earnestly by an attendee that there was no noise in the brain =) Anyways, I think that the brain's neurons use whatever input is available as long as it consistently (by some measure) leads to 'good for the organism'. Inputs that aren't immediately useful are not noise (which has a negative connotation) but are ignored. Or stated otherwise, what is noise now may be useful input should an organism's context change.
There
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In many respects, the brain is isolated from the rest of the body. Search on "the blood-brain barrier" for more information. The brain is not like other organs integrated with the body at all.
Inputs which aren't useful are not ignored. The system has evolved to require redundant and repetitive signals as proof of validity. Occasional errors and aberrations are "filtered" out rather than ignored. This is an important distinction. Actually, as I asserted previously, it isn't even fair to say it is filte
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There is no such thing as a "former autist." You may learn to cope and adjust to having new and improved mental habits and responses, but this is not a "cure." It is an adaptation.
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Bullshit. The brain is a computer. Sure, it's a strange architecture: it's made of billions of impressively energy-efficient [nih.gov] gates each operating at the order of tens of hertz. Fan-out is huge --- a gate on a microprocessor might be connected to 50 others, but a neuron can have tens of thousands of connections. A CPU has one fast, global clock, while the brain has overlapping and distributed clock signals [scholarpedia.org] for synchronizing neuron firing. The short term memory system uses th
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>>both our computers and our brains run software, with only a few basic features baked into the hardware.
No. A great deal of the mechanisms in the brain are hard wired, such as the V1 cortex, which is used for vision, or the hippocampus, or any number of other parts of the brain. Only the neocortex is general purpose, and even then it's much closer to a FPGA than a general purpose computer running software.
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Consider a typical PC. On one level, a great deal of functionality is built into the hardware, including DRAM refreshes, PCI-bus DMA, clock-signal generation, hard drive head seeking, instruction decoding, and in-process arithmetic. At a higher level, however, the entire machine can be directed along lines provided by a dynamic series of instructions, and is completely general purpose.
Why would we be any different? At low levels of abstraction, behavior is autonomous, but together these facilities provide a
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Bullshit. The brain is a computer.
The brain is a computer? Bullshit.
Our brains are not magical devices somehow above scientific inquiry.
This is the only true statement you've made.
They are ordinary, pedestrian objects in that obey the same laws of physics that govern baseballs and light switches.
How very 19th century of you. Given what you've written, I'm going to assume that you're a hard determinist. You're more than 100 years out of date in both physics and philosophy.
You're magically thinking has lead to believe things without evidence. You sound very religious.
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As a general rule, one should use the simplest possible explanation that fits the data. Current physics is certainly sufficient to describe the operation of the brain, and there is no reason to postulate a more complex mechanism absent without evidence. Gaps in our understanding of the brain do not in themselves count as evidence. We don't fully understand turbulence either, but have no reason to believe it's caused by evil fluid gremlins.
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You say that ...
Current physics is certainly sufficient to describe the operation of the brain
Yet you go on to say ...
Gaps in our understanding of the brain
So ... how do you know that current physics is sufficient to describe the operation of the brain if we don't have a complete (we're not even close) understanding of the brain? This very article suggests that our current understanding of neural communication is fundamentally incomplete, for goodness sake!
I'm reminded of an oft-reported incident in the life of Max Planck: One of his teachers advised him against perusing physics as all of the important discoveries had a
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Waiting for the human botnet (Score:2)
In the anime 'a certain scientific railgun' something akin to electromagnetic waves emitted by human brains are manipulated to create a networked supercomputing cluster. Now it seems not so totally sci-fi.
This probably also helps explain why powerful electromagnetic wave-emitting devices attached to the skull can disable specific parts of the brain in experiments used to e.g. treat/temporarily induce autism.
This is incredible. (Score:5, Interesting)
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There's still a lot about the brain which hasn't been discovered or is weakly supported. One of those things is how humans actually navigate. Some people have a very poor sense of direction and others have a hard time getting lost. Apart from one study which thought that there was a sensor in the ear, which as far as I know wasn't successfully replicated or confirmed, there hasn't been much luck in figuring that out.
Additionally, some people know when there's somebody behind them without having to see or he
Telepathy? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yes, though a repeater could be a cool concept to play with.
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Everyone experiences flashes of telepathy (Score:2)
I think these findings means that ancient anatomists were on the right track. Chinese, indian, celtic - every culture had a unique, take on that which exists beyond the physical world.
In Chinese medicine, the body has several distinct networks of "subtle energy" which serve as blueprints for the physical systems. Some of these systems are the chakras, the aura, and the meridians. Disruptions in the energy systems will eventually result in problems in the physical systems.
Practically speaking, these findings
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Though they say the natural fields are too short range for this, I suppose you could amplify them, and interfere with other brains.
All I know is that all throughout the history of science, the true theories have been laughed at before they were accepted. I guess its time to pay the piper for all the laughing people at "tinfoil hat" (worn to block the mind influencing beams) conspiracy theorists! :)
"Gizmos"? (Score:5, Interesting)
"...and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory."
Bullshit. What concerns where? That conclusion was not in the article. They didn't even talk about region-specific areas like memory.
I swear, people are so dedicated to perpetuating this stupid myth that consumer electronic devices interfere with our brains. Its been so thoroughly debunked that it's almost in the same realm as anti-vaccination/autism beliefs (except it doesn't get people killed.)
electronic gizmos and brain interference.... (Score:3)
Have you ever seen the lineups for the launch of one of these gizmos? Lining up like peasants for bread, but instead of life sustaining nutrition, it was to get an iphone-iv before anybody else. How can you say nothing has interfered with these peoples brains?
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How can you say nothing has interfered with these peoples brains?
You're confusing low-level herd/pack behavior that we share to varying degrees with countless other mammals ... with the EM effects of a phone that's sitting on the shelf in a retail store while you wait in line for it?
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I'm pretty sure that's a "whoosh".
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Shut up and take my money!
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So they found that 70 out of 82 children with autism and bowel disease tested positive for the measles virus. How many healthy children of the same age tested positive for the measles virus? How many children with bowel disease but NOT autism?
Oh, wait, there's no controls at all. While an uncontrolled study can occasionally find the truth (e.g. the aspirin/Reye's syndrome link; no controlled study was ever done, but on the other hand, Reye's has just about disappeared), it's still not very good evidence.
External EM Fields DO Affect Brain (Score:2)
I swear, people are so dedicated to perpetuating this stupid myth that consumer electronic devices interfere with our brains
Researchers USE external EM fields as a non-invasive method of testing/altering brain function. Whether consumer electronic devices are powerful enough to alter computation in the brain, I don't know if they have studied that or not, but it is well within the realm of possibility.
Here is just one example of many of EM fields used to study human cognition, in this case it impacted morality:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/bending-morality-magnetism
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Maybe the interaction is too small to have an effect on one's health, but nobody proved that yet.
So all the studies done to date all have shown no detectable effect. How can that mean anything other than the effect must *at worst* be very very small.
People have and do work in very high EM environments for a large part of their lives. They don't have a higher rate of anything outside expected norms. What does that show?
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SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.
Any demand to be "100% sure" that an effect does not exist is unreasonable nonsense. Nobody can do that. All we can do is make observations, derive mathematical patterns from them (we call these "theories") and make predictions based on these generalizations with the aim of finding conflicts between the theory and the observation. If we find an
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The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection published a document containing all the information one could possibly want. [icnirp.de]. Read the conclusions section if nothing else.
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What? "Debate being on" and results pointing both ways is a meaningless metric, there's always results pointing both ways!
The question is, how much, how strong, how reliable. I've seen this "it's still undecided"-argument used far too often by some who want to ignore studies they don't like.
My brain is located around my crotch (Score:2)
If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought
At least, that's what my girlfriend says.
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Does she also say that she likes you for your brains?
If she started rambling along like a Zombie out of a George Romero film, and started mumbling "Brains!" . . . I would have a bigger problem.
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...and you want us to believe that you got a girlfriend? Riiiiiiiight... ;)
Actually, we've been living together for almost 20 years. On business trips to the USA, I get hassled by some of the chicks in my company: "Are you still together with your girlfrien!?!?!? Why haven't you married her yet!?!?!?!"
I answer that living in sin is fun, because doing stuff nasty and forbidden is always fun.
My girlfriend is German, and I'm American. My "mother-in-law" was "not too enthused" about our relationship. After 10 years, she shrugged, and started introducing me to friends as her "so
Thank you (Score:2)
Thank you, Mr. Electricity Company, for helping my neuron's fire!
I read this on Slashdot more than 5 years ago (Score:3)
I read this on Slashdot more than 5 years ago.
No, not exactly this, but a similar phenomenon.
Someone had used a programmable curcuit board and let it evolve using some simple evolutionary algorithm. After thousands or perhaps millions of iteration where only the best design solution(s) were allowed to survive they examined the final results. Strangely, one of the finalist could not be understood by the circuit board analysis program. So, they took to analyses the device manually. What they eventually found was that it had designed a little radio telescope of sorts which had sent its signal across an unconnected, empty area without wiring! I have tried several times to find the article again. If someone else remembers it, please, reply and gives us a link.
Anyhow, my friends and I speculated back then - cool what if this would happen in nature! And, wow, it looks like it has!
The Evolved Radio and its Implications (Score:2)
Jon Bird and Paul Layzell
Bird, Lazyell reference Thompson's work, and show how this kind of hardware development can lead to novel sensors:
IV. UNCONSTRAINED INTRINSIC HARDWARE EVOLUTION
Unconstrained intrinsic HE design usually comprises a computer running an EA and a reconfigurable device, such as an FPGA, on which individual genotypes are instantiated as physical electronic circuits. The fitness of a given circuit is determined solely by its real time behaviour and other factors, such as topology, are not considered. For example, Thompson [9] evolved a circuit on a small corner of a Xilinx XC6216 FPGA that was able to discriminate between two square wave inputs of 1 kHz and 10 kHz without using any of the counters/timers or RC networks that conventional design would require for this task. The evolved circuit contained several continuous-time recurrent loops and the timing mechanism relied on a subtle analogue property - possibly parasitic capacitance - which affected delays in the internal signal paths according to the input frequency [23]. Both the loops and the timing mechanism would have been forbidden under conventional design procedure, but the evolved circuit made more parsimonious use of the silicon.
Unconstrained, intrinsic HE therefore shows potential for the design of analogue dynamical systems that may prove more successful for certain tasks than conventional design. This approach may also lead to the discovery of novel electronic ‘tricks’ not yet exploited by conventional design. Layzell [24] developed the Evolvable Motherboard (EM) to investigate some of the key issues in intrinsic HE, in particular to evaluate the relative merits of different basic components, methods of analysis and interconnection architectures. The next section gives an overview of this testbed and describes an experiment where he intrinsically evolved the first oscillators to reach their target frequency.
Evolution is then free to explore very unusual designs: circuits with structures and intricate dynamical behaviours beyond the scope of conventional design. In unconstrained HE, the circuit primitives do not have their behaviour constrained within specific input and output ranges or by temporal coordination, nor are they restricted to playing specific functional roles. Consequently, the process of unconstrained intrinsic HE is more like tinkering than conventional engineering [10,11] and in some key aspects is analogous to natural evolution.
In particular, this paper details an unconstrained, intrinsic HE experiment where a network of transistors sensed and utilised the radio waves emanating from a nearby PC. Essentially, the EA led to the construction of a radio...
We do get excited easily! (Score:3)
We do get excited easily! But, then none of us are electrical engineers, and none of us are familiar with "capacitive coupling", which from the tone of your message is well known.
Anyhow, thanks for that information!.
The Slashdot article, from 2001 (Score:3)
Excellent!!! Thanks!
Searching for Adrian Thompson led me to the Slashdot article, from 2001: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/12/29/007258/Evolutionary-Computing-Via-FPGAs [slashdot.org]
Ten years ago? I just felt ten years older...
Everyone is connected? (Score:2)
Maybe your intelligence isn't yours, but a shared intelligence with your peer group.
Maybe I'm selling futures in LENR.
My cell phone makes me feel funny (not...) (Score:2)
I am hardly a scientist and absolutely not a doctor but if EM fields like the ones emitted from a cell phone had a drastic effect on brain function, wouldn't we notice? I can tell when i'm tired or drunk or otherwise unable to concentrate, and I don't get that feeling when my moms calls to see how I'm doing...
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Yes, we'd notice. If the EM field from a cell phone (which is pretty weak) had any significant effect on brain function, then the much more powerful fields from radar, MRI and such would cause full-blown seizures.
They don't - they don't do much of anything - so that addendum to the post is completely wrong. And for the same reason, the research is very likely wrong too.
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.. if EM fields like the ones emitted from a cell phone had a drastic effect on brain function, wouldn't we notice?
Whether it is in line at the supermarket, in an airport, driving, or at a restaurant - the people that seem most annoying and stupid are usually holding a cellphone up to their ear.
At least with this new research, I now can stop getting angry and don' t have to yell at them anymore. It's not their fault, that they don't have a working brain.
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brain cancer has a pretty drastic effect on function
Shameless self publicity by the guest author (Score:2, Interesting)
"This is truly paradigm-busting work." In fact, probably not. I haven't read the background articles in detail, but the observed effect is either expected or completely unoriginal. It's not completely uninteresting, but to describe it as paradigm-busting is seriously overstating the article's significance.
In a little more detail. Using local extracellular current injections (not airy-fairy distant fields) to stimulate neurons is a technique going back more than a hundred years (Galvani...). It has also been
50 years of ephaptic transmission (Score:2)
In pre-digital telephones there was a phenomenon called crosstalk where you could here faintly and sporadically someone else's conversation. Imagine if you were studying the phone system to try and discover how the city or country "thinks". Would you spend a lot of time analyzing the crosstalk?
Oh, and notice that this research was done in brain slices, Perhaps
soooo ... wifi makes me smarter? (Score:2)
And all those fears about the national stoopidification by TV appear groundless now. With almost a century of wireless RF broadcasting pretty much every where, we went to the Moon, developed antibiotics, and decoded the human genome!
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go stick my head in the microwave for a quick topping-off and then tackle the Sunday crossword puzzle!
could explain synesthesia (Score:2)
NAS (Score:2)
My brain ... (Score:2)
Re:Ah we do need Tin Foil Hats (Score:4, Informative)
For all helmets [made with foil], we noticed a 30 db amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium. In addition, all helmets exhibited a marked 20 db attenuation at around 1.5 Ghz, with no significant attenuation beyond 10 db anywhere else.
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet
Re: (Score:2)
In a related story, I heard on the subway that vaccines cause autism!
Re: (Score:2)
In a related story, I heard on the subway that vaccines cause autism!
Just yesterday on slashdot, I read that vaccines killed Bill Gates!