Next: Monitoring the body’s electrical signalling to enhance brain health

Researchers are seek­ing to record and inter­pret the body’s elec­tri­cal sig­nals. Pic­ture: ZEISS Microscopy/Flickr

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READING THE BODY’S ELECTRICAL SIGNALS TO TREAT ILLNESS (Uni­ver­si­ty of Melbourne):

“Chem­i­cal elec­tric­i­ty is how we move, think, and remember.

And increas­ing­ly, as tech­nol­o­gy minia­turis­es and com­put­er pow­er mul­ti­plies, it’s how we are treat­ing chron­ic illness.

Since the ful­ly implantable pace­mak­er was devel­oped in the 1950s to keep a patient’s heart beat­ing in rhythm using elec­tri­cal impuls­es, engi­neers have now gone on to devel­op devices that can be implant­ed direct­ly in the brain, under the scalp, or even inside blood ves­sels to treat dis­eases and dis­or­ders like Parkinson’s and epilep­sy, as well as men­tal ill­ness­es and paralysis.

But Pro­fes­sor David Gray­den in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Melbourne’s Depart­ment of Bio­med­ical Engi­neer­ing is aim­ing to go fur­ther … He and oth­er researchers are attempt­ing to lis­ten back and inter­pret the body’s elec­tri­cal signalling.

This would allow the new devices to actu­al­ly pre­dict the state of an ill­ness or its symp­toms – whether it’s detect­ing a loom­ing seizure in the case of epilep­sy, or the ear­ly stages of inflam­ma­tion in a con­di­tion like inflam­ma­to­ry bow­el dis­ease (IBD)” … “What we want to be able to do is record what the brain is doing and then stim­u­late it in a way where we can steer it to react in the way we want it to.” –> Keep read­ing arti­cle HERE

News in Context:

• Six DARPA-fund­ed research teams aim at rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing non­in­va­sive brain-machine interfaces
• Five rea­sons the future of brain enhance­ment is dig­i­tal, per­va­sive and (hope­ful­ly) bright
• Impor­tant insights on the grow­ing home use of tDCS brain stimulation
• 10 Neu­rotech­nolo­gies About to Trans­form Brain Enhance­ment and Brain Health