If you've watched Arrow on TV, then you probably know that Felicity started walking again after a spinal implant restored her brain signal back to her legs. It's comic book sci-fi of the worst kind, a made up magic cure to advance the plot.
See, if somebody has a cord break, then the signal has a gap on the road from brain to muscles in the legs. And that's a permanent problem in the real world. Or is it?
The Swiss are pioneering a new spinal implant, and it seems to be working.
[video=youtube_share;XFXWR4b9iVA]https://youtu.be/XFXWR4b9iVA[/video]
This is the kind of scientific advance that we all need. It's probably the sort of thing we could be doing more of, if resources weren't being wasted on really dumb things.
The whole idea of using computer coding skills to talk to our brains is gaining considerable traction nowadays. There's some cool work being done on bioelectric implants to talk to the brain via the vagus nerve. Fixing the electrical coded impulses that the vagus takes back from internal organs to the brain can change the immune response. That's completely outside of the science we learned.
It used to be thought that we had 2 control systems. One was fast- the nervous system, running reflexes. Sort of a telephone network.
The other was slow- the neurohumoral chemical system- blood borne, relying on secretions, and working via DNA regulation in target tissues over time. Sort of a plumbing network.
Well the vagus pacemaker shows that the telephones talk to the plumbing. In other words, it's not two systems. It's one. And we can hack it.
The potential uses for sending fixed code up to change the immune response is gigantic. Let me give you an example:
I had a lady patient years ago, who turned up with gallstone symptoms, confirmed by ultrasound. So she got sent off to a surgeon friend to do the operation. He called me with bad news: sure there were gallstones, but the whole abdomen was also riddled with small tumors, which the ultrasound couldn't see. It was widespread cancer. He closed it up and basically sent her back for me to handle the certain death.
I gave her the news, and then she unexpectedly lived for 20 years. How did that happen? Well it's a spontaneous remission. They occur from time to time, because there's an immune response that clobbers the cancer.
Here's the thing:
That immune response? It has a code.
If we can get enough of these isolated people together, read the signals in their vagus nerves, and parse the signal through a mathematical decoder, we can read it, and send it up to the brains of every cancer patient that gets the implant. We'd be basically copy-pasting the instruction set.
Maybe we can get every cancer to remit. Maybe it won't work. But it's sure worth a shot.
See, if somebody has a cord break, then the signal has a gap on the road from brain to muscles in the legs. And that's a permanent problem in the real world. Or is it?
The Swiss are pioneering a new spinal implant, and it seems to be working.
[video=youtube_share;XFXWR4b9iVA]https://youtu.be/XFXWR4b9iVA[/video]
This is the kind of scientific advance that we all need. It's probably the sort of thing we could be doing more of, if resources weren't being wasted on really dumb things.
The whole idea of using computer coding skills to talk to our brains is gaining considerable traction nowadays. There's some cool work being done on bioelectric implants to talk to the brain via the vagus nerve. Fixing the electrical coded impulses that the vagus takes back from internal organs to the brain can change the immune response. That's completely outside of the science we learned.
It used to be thought that we had 2 control systems. One was fast- the nervous system, running reflexes. Sort of a telephone network.
The other was slow- the neurohumoral chemical system- blood borne, relying on secretions, and working via DNA regulation in target tissues over time. Sort of a plumbing network.
Well the vagus pacemaker shows that the telephones talk to the plumbing. In other words, it's not two systems. It's one. And we can hack it.
The potential uses for sending fixed code up to change the immune response is gigantic. Let me give you an example:
I had a lady patient years ago, who turned up with gallstone symptoms, confirmed by ultrasound. So she got sent off to a surgeon friend to do the operation. He called me with bad news: sure there were gallstones, but the whole abdomen was also riddled with small tumors, which the ultrasound couldn't see. It was widespread cancer. He closed it up and basically sent her back for me to handle the certain death.
I gave her the news, and then she unexpectedly lived for 20 years. How did that happen? Well it's a spontaneous remission. They occur from time to time, because there's an immune response that clobbers the cancer.
Here's the thing:
That immune response? It has a code.
If we can get enough of these isolated people together, read the signals in their vagus nerves, and parse the signal through a mathematical decoder, we can read it, and send it up to the brains of every cancer patient that gets the implant. We'd be basically copy-pasting the instruction set.
Maybe we can get every cancer to remit. Maybe it won't work. But it's sure worth a shot.
