Neurobiology For Dummies
Explore BookHow Can Paralysis Be Cured?
- Rehabilitation and training help in all types of paralysis by strengthening pathways and recruiting alternate ones to bypass the injury.
- Considerable current research is being done on the cause of the paralysis. Curing the actual disease is almost always the treatment of first choice.
- One promising treatment for strokes and tumors involves regrowing neurons by taking cells that have been reprogrammed to be neural stem cells and doing autologous transplants derived from the person’s own tissue put into the damaged region.
- Other research efforts involve the use of growth factors to stimulate regeneration in damaged brain areas.
- Prosthetics may be used to alleviate paralysis by capturing the high-level neural signal for movement, bypassing the injury, and stimulating movement closer to the muscle, or by capturing high-level motor command signals and performing body movements with mechanical devices, such as prosthetic limbs or exoskeletons that magnify with motors the force exerted by our limbs, or that respond to brain commands for movement recorded by electrodes.
Can the Mind Be Downloaded?
- What we actually know about the brain is that it’s extremely complex. It consists of on the order of 100 billion neurons each with a thousand connections to other neurons. No present-day substrate can come close to this complexity.
- Neuroscientists think that the essential function of the brain is carried out by neural computations that generate action potentials that are sent to other neurons.
- Even if we could measure the firing of every neuron in the brain, and the strength of every synapse producing that firing, and download or model that in silicon, we still don’t know if it would actually work like a human brain.
Can Imaging Systems Read Our Minds?
Are Cyborgs Possible?
Cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) already exist! Any one of the more than 100,000 people worldwide who has a cochlear implant to restore hearing is essentially a cyborg, a functional combination of organic and machine parts. Your Great-Aunt Gertie suddenly seems much cooler, doesn’t she? The real question is how rapidly additional brain functions will be carried out with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and how quickly they’ll be developed.
Here are some interesting ideas about cyborgs:- The beginning of the human cyborg era began with the need to restore lost function, particularly hearing, where the BCI was relatively straightforward.
- Research is underway to use a cyborg approach to repair some kinds of blindness via miniature cameras and arrays of stimulators to inject the camera signal into the nervous system.
- A long-standing project is aimed at replacing some memory functions in a portion of the medial lobe of the brain called the hippocampus with silicon circuitry.
- Just as the nervous system adapts to new and novel inputs, such as those that occur when learning how to ride a bicycle or drive a car, it can likely adapt to direct injection of signals into the nervous system.