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remote control of the brain

24.08.2017

When we see how someone controls someone else's brain from a distance, makes someone else run, jump, wave their arms, etc. against their will, this means that we are watching a sci-fi movie, or some kind of mystical fantasy. Although modern science is doing everything possible to make such a fantasy come true.

Researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo have learned to literally control the mouse - using the method of magnetic-temperature stimulation. The matter was not without genetic engineering: the gene for a protein was inserted into the animals, which controls the flow of ions through the cell membrane and which simultaneously responds to temperature.

Once in the membrane of nerve cells, such an ion channel stimulated their activity when heated: the ion gate opened, the ions rearranged, the potential difference outside and inside the membrane changed, and the cell generated an electrochemical pulse.

The heater was magnetic nanoparticles made of cobalt ferrite and manganese ferrite. The nanoparticles were injected into a specific area of the brain where there were genetically modified neurons; the particles stuck to the surface of the cells, and now it only remained to heat them up in an alternating magnetic field - due to the rapid changes in the magnetization, the nanoparticles released heat, activating heat-sensitive ion channels.

Arnd Pralle and his colleagues have been developing this method for about ten years - it all started with the stimulation of cell colonies growing in laboratory glassware, they were replaced by roundworms, and now it has come to mice.

The researchers experimented with the motor areas of the brain: thus, by acting on the motor cortex, mice were forced to run, and when stimulated by the striatum, the rodents began to spin in place. Stimulation of other zones plunged the mice into a stupor, so that they could not move a single paw. According to the authors of the work, the neurons that were affected by nanoparticles and the field remained alive and well, despite repeated stimulation.

The advantage of magnetic-temperature stimulation is that it can turn on very small neural groups, only 100 micrometers across.

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