I thought you should know about this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9474-rewired-brain-revives-patient-after-19-years.html excerpt: Would be really cool if we could find ways to speed up this process or "suggest" to the brains to start making these new pathways. But I think that we know too little about brains to do the latter.
To whom would it even occur to deny the family a reevaluation of Terrence's medical condition, and how could they possibly make such a decision stick?
This is a debateable topic. Presumably we are born with a certain amount of brain cells and neurons do not regenerate, we assume? I've read this article very carefully when it first came out a couple of weeks ago and as you can see, the brain did not replicate new neurons, it reconnected the existing neuron axons. This is feasible. Now as you may or may not know, I am partially paralyzed from a root avulsion injury - one less than Christopher Reeves had and only on my right side, not both. I underwent massive microneurological reconstructive surgery where they harvested the sural nerves in my legs and used them to splice together the intercoastal nerves from my right diaphragm to my brachial plexus and down through my right arm to reinervate my shoulder, biceps, and hand movement. Reinervation takes about one inch per month. So after about one year the humurus bone actually sucked back into my shoulder socket preventing, thus preventing amputation of my right arm. It took three years before I regained partial movement to my fingers, but by then there was so much atrophy that usage is only minimal. So you see, that's how it works. No new nerve cells develop: only a reconnection of existing ones, and to where? With microneural surgery you really have to know what you're doing and 15 years ago when I had mine done, there were only about a half dozen physicians in the world that knew how to do it. How this guy in the news managed a comeback from such a prolonged coma state is a mystery to physicians and science. A few months ago I posted an article that was on MSNBC about the world's first bionic man who is embedding computer chips into his arm. A one millimeter chip contains about a million transistors and 300,000 capacitors or something like that. This guy can now interphase himself with a computer, move his hand, and through the internet he can move a robotic hand in the exact same manner half way around the world. The next thing he wants to do is to implant chips in his brain because he believes that by doing so he will be one step ahead of the "eventual robotic takeover" of the Earth. This is not as farfetched as it sounds. Experiments with mice, or rats?, have shown that scientists can embed a specially designed computer chip into the brain and the existing axons will bind to the computer chip's receptors and then certain types of behavior of the mouse can be controlled by a computer. I don't find it scary at all, just fascinating.
We already have ways to do this, they are called nootropics. Smart drugs. We know how to increase intelligene using drugs, and people already use it to have photographic memories to pass tests. You also have ritalin and other drugs, crack, meth, all which alter brain chemistry in such way that they can influence how the brain wires. In general, the brain wires based on use, and nutrition, and therefore there are drugs which can cause this.
Actually the brains neurons can regenerate, we just have not figured out exactly why. We speculate that nutrition and use of the brain have a lot to do with it.
The brain is not as plastic as some psychologists and neurologists like to pretend it is. It is a recent fad, and it is becoming something of an ideological war amongst experts. The fact remains that the brain is extremely rigid in its layout, very bad at rewiring itself, and the few studies to the contrary overstate the issue.
Imagine if that guys 'chipped' arm could control a robot arm attached to another human being Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! So much we do not know about how we work, the more we learn, the more we learn we have yet more to learn
