Ultimately the methods pioneered by Lieber and his colleagues could lead to new ways to treat neurodegenerative diseases and paralysis,
as well as mapping out the brain in greater detail than ever before.
The team brought together by Lieber is made up of internationally renowned physicists,
neuroscientists and chemists,
and he thinks the technique could make a huge difference in the future.
Once injected,
the miniature scaffolding is able to unfurl itself and melds with the existing brain tissue - the neurons apparently look at the new
mesh as a friendly support rather than something alien to the body.
From there,
individual neurons can be both monitored and stimulated through a small connection to the brain.
The group of scientists Lieber has brought together are trying to solve a long-standing neuroscience mystery:
exactly how the activity of individual brain cells lead to larger cognitive powers.
Because the new mesh is 95 percent free space,
and made of very soft and flexible silk,
the brain tissue is able to comfortably rearrange itself around it.
"
I think it's great,
a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain,"
Rafael Yuste,
director of the Neurotechnology Centre at Columbia University in New York,
told Nature.com.
source:
source 1,
source 2
Publishing their results in the journal Cortex,
a team from the University of North Carolina in the US used a low dose of electrical current to enhance brain waves called alpha oscillations,
which naturally occur when someone is day-dreaming.
"
We've provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behaviour - in this case,
creativity.
But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses."
Specifically,
there's already strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations.
Alpha oscillations occur within the low range between 8 and 12 Hertz,
and are most prominent when we close our eyes and meditate or get lost in our own thoughts,
which led scientists to associate them with creativity.
As soon as we have more pressing tasks to attend to,
higher frequencies such as gamma oscillations take over.
These electrical currents were either placebo stimulations,
that let participants feel a little tingle but didn't do much else,
or 10-Hertz currents,
designed to work in unison to trigger alpha oscillations.
The independently graded results showed that those who had received the alpha oscillation stimulation performed far better than those who hadn't.
To make sure that the alpha oscillations were really causing this creativity boost,
the team repeated the experiment using 40-Hertz electrical stimulation,
which boosted the activity of gamma oscillations instead. This had no benefit on creativity.
Read more here
