One day you can see yourself breathing in fresh air on an idyllic lonely island, with the clean ocean at your feet and your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over slightly undulating waters … Nothing around you except the perfect nature and your. You ask yourself, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? Well, precisely a group of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) is in the early stages of evaluating their ability to create, edit and delete sensory experiences from our brains, both in real time and in our stored memories. .
Would you put your brain in the hands of scientists who can create immersive worlds and even trick your mind into thinking these images are real? This team of neuroscientists is trying to reverse engineer experiences by stimulating neurons to excite the same neural patterns.
Currently, the steps to achieve this are … a bit invasive. Scientists genetically engineer neurons with photosensitive proteins so that they can carefully manipulate neurons using light. This is what we know as optogenetics , for which a metal plate must also be surgically implanted over the target area.
In the new study, published in the journal Nature Communications , the scientists announced an essential first step in simulating false sensations in the human brain that are so real that our brains may think they are really ours, that we experience them at some point.
Researchers Nicolas C. Pégard, Alan R. Mardinly, and Ian Anton Oldenburg (with supervision from Hillel Adesnik), detailed how they ‘hacked’ the brains of laboratory rats to create such false images. They used laser lighter flashes in the brain to activate or suppress individual neurons. By doing this, they were able to simulate patterns that mimic brain activity. Thus, they tried to display visual stimuli in the form of holographic obstacles, which the running mice actively tried to avoid.
The technology used to generate the holograms is called “time-focused 3D-scanless optogenetics” or 3D-SHOT. A liquid crystal display acts like a photographic negative, but for holograms. Using this negative, scientists mold lasers into 3D patterns of their choice, inside the brain. Then every millisecond laser pulses are fired in bursts to keep the hologram.
How did the researchers know that the mouse brain was indeed “tricked”?
“At the same time we were using our holograms, we could see the neurons flicker,” explains Alan R. Mardinly.
The scientists also recorded video footage of what they were seeing inside the rodents’ brains. Activated neurons glowed fluorescent green, while purple arrows indicated the laser light that activated them.
But it was not 3D-SHOT that attracted the most attention: “The ingenuity of the team led us to advance the study: the ability to direct and fire specific neurons without causing neighboring neurons to fire. We knew that each neuron has its own distant target. you’re trying to accomplish, but unless you can input and write a pattern to one neuron and not the neighboring neuron, you don’t have the ability to ask questions about what’s going on and what these different patterns mean, “Oldenburg explains.
For some observers, the experiment invites comparisons to science fiction and fears that this technology is inevitably used for mind control or emotional manipulation. Researchers reject this kind of thinking. First, s olo because a mouse can be done, does not mean that in a human itself.
Referencia: Three-dimensional scanless holographic optogenetics with temporal focusing (3D-SHOT). Nature Communication doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01031-3
