The Bionic Mind: Building Brain Implants To Fight Depression, PTSD
The next step is much more sophisticated: a “closed-loop” system, with sensors in the brain, and feedback. So it can pick up when brain activity is going off course, try to correct it in real-time, and then tell whether the correction has worked.
If that sounds sort of like your phone’s GPS system, well, it is, says Dr. Emery Brown, an MIT computational neuroscientist who’ll be working on the algorithms for the brain implant.If you’re trying to get from Boston to Providence and you go off course, your GPS picks up your error and points you back to the right road, he says. With the brain implant, “If I see that your brain activity is starting to move back into that state indicative of you not feeling well, toward a depressed state or toward fears associated with PTSD, then I’m going to stimulate to correct that. It’s wholly analogous, and in fact, the paradigm really follows precisely the paradigm used to build GPS.”
First, though, scientists need to learn how to recognize which patterns of brain activity — which “neural signatures” — indicate depression and PTSD.
Devotional blog dedicated to the Goddess Sigyn offering support to those who are "holding the bowl" within difficult relationships.
Holding the Bowl 