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Science

Neuroscientists Say They've Found An Entirely New Form of Neural Communication (sciencealert.com) 94

Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another -- even if they've been surgically severed. The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections. ScienceAlert reports: "We don't know yet the 'So what?' part of this discovery entirely," says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University. "But we do know that this seems to be an entirely new form of communication in the brain, so we are very excited about this." To that end, Durand and his team investigated slow periodic activity in vitro, studying the brain waves in This neural activity can actually be modulated - strengthened or blocked - by applying weak electrical fields and could be an analogue form of another cell communication method, called ephaptic coupling.

The team's most radical finding was that these electrical fields can activate neurons through a complete gap in severed brain tissue, when the two pieces remain in close physical proximity. slices extracted from decapitated mice. What they found was that slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which in turn activate neighboring cells, constituting a form of neural communication without chemical synaptic transmission or gap junctions. "To ensure that the slice was completely cut, the two pieces of tissue were separated and then rejoined while a clear gap was observed under the surgical microscope," the authors explain in their paper. "The slow hippocampal periodic activity could indeed generate an event on the other side of a complete cut through the whole slice." The findings are reported in The Journal of Physiology.

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Neuroscientists Say They've Found An Entirely New Form of Neural Communication

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  • Its electric fields that can affect other cells in close proximity not connected. Brain WiFi ,not mysterious just took medicine a long time and lots of dead decapitated mice to work out.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      It must be quantum. Please upload my brain now.

    • "Brain WiFi "
      BiFi for short. Unfortunately, most people forgot the password for their BiFi network.

    • The big news here is that the tinfoil hat crowd was right after all. This is sort of amazing. While it was always plausible that sufficiently strong EM waves might disrupt conventional eired neural connections there wasn't a known mechanism by which weak EM waves would be harmful.

      Now there is a very clearly plausible way weak EM waves might distrup parts of ones neural activity without disruption other parts making it very hard to actually measure the effect. THat is presumably these severed neuron coupl

    • by Anonymous Coward

      This appears to be a natural defense against scientists slicing your brain.

  • So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects... besides just 'heating effects'.

    And that means there is a theoretical mechanism for (say) cell phone radiation to cause cancer.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'm not so sure brain communications are responsible for cancer. Could have sworn it was DNA mutations...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects... besides just 'heating effects'.

      Like to the center line of a fish such as sharks that feel the weak EM fields of the activated muscles of their pray over a short distance.

    • Non sequitur? How do you jump from potential communication to causing cancer?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You'll get modded down for that but yes, it is a thing. Like everythigng in life not everyone is necessarily susceptable in the same way. I don't have an answer for why but something I learned as teen was that wireless made my head hurt. That doesn't mean all access points are bad but I can tell when I'm near a transmitter. The more power, the more the effect. WIreless access points don't bother me unless I'm physically near them. Cell and commercial two-way radio towers tend to be weak enough

    • by Ozoner ( 1406169 )

      No, it is Low Frequency (eg DC) currents in the brain, not RF (Radio Frequency) currents induced from outside.
      It has been long known that nerves can only respond to quite low frequencies (eg audio).

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Wow that's got to be a world record attempt at a logical jump. You could become the Evil Knievel of pseudo science if you keep that up!
    • So _weak_ electromagnetic fields _can_ have biological effects ...That means there is a theoretical mechanism for (say) cell phone radiation to cause cancer.

      You conflate "effect" with "causing an unintended chemical reaction". There is a partial answer from quantum mechanics. You seem to propose that cell phone electromagnetic radiation can cause unintended chemical reactions in organic molecules. This requires exciting electrons so that they move to higher energy molecular orbitals. If the energy is higher than the activation energy, then a molecule may dissociate or otherwise change state in without being catalyzed in the usual controlled way by an enzyme.

      As

    • Another problem with your argument is the extreme gap between these .5 Hz waves and ~2 GHz cell phone frequency, ten orders of magnitude. These brain waves are not electromagnetic in nature at all, rather they propagate by electrostatic coupling. There is no relationship with cell phone radiation other than that both involve photons.

  • http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/48/15800 [jneurosci.org]
    "Thus, the hypothesis that the propagation of neural activity can be carried out solely by electric fields is consistent with experimental data as well as computer simulations. The fact that the speed of the propagation remains constant under different experimental conditions can be explained by the presence of an electric field effect associated with neural firing generated by the network configuration and not by the properties of individual cells. This electrical field effect is revealed when synaptic transmission is blocked and both pathologic and normal propagation can exist simultaneously with field effect governing short range or local propagation, where synaptic transmission may govern long-range propagation and communication."

  • Neural nets (Score:4, Funny)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @02:25AM (#58150540) Homepage

    One of the additions to artificial neural nets to make them more useful but obstensibly less brain-like was to add error methods to backpropogate to (relatively) remote parts of the network. Does this make real neural nets more like artificial neural nets?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Not at all. The AI's we build is just applying a stupidly large amount of linear algebra to even mindboggling stupidly larger amounts of data and trying to mash and push and twiddle weights until most of the time the answers are right. You can't add a 1001st image to Imagenet by telling it 'A zebra is a stripey horse'. Literally, just those 6 words. It has no understanding of anything. Until you can, what we're building isn't like the brain or artificially intelligent at all.

      • You get a Gold Star, AC, for grasping the reality of the much-hyped, so-called 'AI' they keep trotting out. Until we have the instrumentality to actually understand how a living brain functions (which we do not), we won't have any idea how 'thinking' or 'consciousness' actually works.

        Spread the word. Make more people understand what you now know. Fight the hype.
    • Given 10,000 connections between average neurons, that might not be such a stretch.

      Also AI is trying to train with a simple mathematical model de novo. Reality probably evolved specialized parts of the brain that trained on limited, filtered inputs (that themselves evolved as feeders) for just...this...thing and no others. We already know there's special brain hardware for faces, vertical lines, and so on.

      • The most marvelous aspect of all, for me, is how we are born with some of these networks pre-trained. How is that encoded? Does the encoding propagate entirely via genes or are there side channels?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It's quite obvious that this is possible.
    Basically, every neuron is its own radio station and receiver by the definition of what it means to transmit electrical signals.

    And I remember a study where they showed dendrites growing towards other neurons, as if they knew where they were.

    So of course my first hypothesis would be, that the dendrites grow along the em fields.

    Another interesting idea that I always had, is that there in nothing, per se, speaking against the possibility brain-to-brain communication. (

    • The fields in question are electrostatic, not radio waves. But don't let that stop you from publishing your new paper.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    E.S.P.

    Okay, three, but you already knew that, too!

  • by louzer ( 1006689 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @02:54AM (#58150592)
    Woo peddlers are going to love this. Now they are going to say this is proof for telepathy, souls, spells, etc.
    • ...and 73 new crowdfunding campaign spread accross Kickstarter, Indigogo and the like, wanting to built some weird electro-gizmo, like headbands generating magnetic field to "boost concentration", "optimize sleep", etc.

      Hey, let's jump in!
      Who's coming with me?

      Let's crowdfund the SlashdotBrainBooster(tm)(c) !

      • by tsa ( 15680 )

        So maybe that thing Doc Brown was wearing in Back to the Future could work after all. It just had to be calibrated correctly.

      • Come on - this is Slashdot, it'd be more like the SlashdotBrainMusher or SlashdotIQReducer ;-)

    • We are just trying to get you to catch up. It's a bit like having a whole bunch of blind people running around claiming that light doesn't exist.
    • Woo peddlers are going to love this. Now they are going to say this is proof for telepathy, souls, spells, etc.

      Wouldn't discovering a physical explanation for something be the very opposite of woo?

      If telepathy can be explained as a consequence of this new neural connection, that turns it from a supernatural to a natural (but perhaps not entirely understood) phenomenon.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        That's a favourite trap of the woo. It *sounds* like something science-y, so it's true!

        That's why they love anything quantum. It's weird and mysterious, and popular science articles make up all kinds of silly analogies, so just about anything sounds plausible.

        Brain wifi -> telepathy seems perfectly logical. Never mind that the range on this "wifi" had to be observed with a microscope.

      • Woo peddlers are going to love this. Now they are going to say this is proof for telepathy, souls, spells, etc.

        Wouldn't discovering a physical explanation for something be the very opposite of woo?

        If telepathy can be explained as a consequence of this new neural connection, that turns it from a supernatural to a natural (but perhaps not entirely understood) phenomenon.

        Before explaining a phenomenon, first prove it exists.

        Telepathy can't cross that simple test.

    • I never understood what is so woo about telepathy. We already have telepathy (mind to mind idea transfer) that is transferred via modulated sound pressure propagation - aka speaking.

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @02:57AM (#58150594)

    Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another ...

    AT&T preemptively brands their phones: "5 EEG"

  • by Ozoner ( 1406169 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @06:12AM (#58151002)

    This report seems to be rather misleading. We know that nerves (eg synaps) can communicate by low frequencies (eg DC and VLF), so cutting the brain matter, then re-joining it should still allow conduction. No surprise there.

  • by tsa ( 15680 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @07:09AM (#58151148) Homepage

    Broken sentences, sentences without capitalization, a garbled mess.... Do the /. editors actually read what they post?

  • They said that this was happening about 100 years ago, but nobody was able to isolate it until now.

  • ... Qualcomm holds key patents on this.

  • So potentially we can affect the operation of peoples' brains using electric fields?

  • Could this phenomena explain the lack of split consciousness after one undergoes Corpus callosotomy?
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]

  • Is it possible that this new form of neural communication could be received by another person? Maybe they are really on to something.

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