New upcoming device will soon let us replace lost senses

Scientists are working on a device that will one day help replace lost senses in a person.

The device, named ‘holographic brain modulator’, is being manufactured by neuroscientists at the University of California and is still at its early stages. However, scientists have described some promising early results in their study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The method includes the holographic brain modulator that uses light as a tool and makes use of light flashes to activate or suppress living brain cells in a way that imitates real patterns of brain activity. With this, the brain can be fooled into thinking something it hasn’t felt or sensed before.

The holograms can stimulate, edit and suppress patterns of neurons that correlate with the brain activity of actual experiences. The device, when completely developed, can one day ‘allow the blind to see or the paralyzed to feel touch’ by projecting holograms onto the brain cells, reported Independent.

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A participant of the project Dr. Alan Mardinly expressed, “This is one of the first steps in a long road to develop a technology that could be a virtual brain implant with additional senses or enhanced senses.”

The researchers have already conducted initial experiments by modifying the brain cells of mice and with this they hope that the technology can soon imitate senses such as sight or touch in people who have lost them.

With the insertion of light-sensitive channels into brain cells, they open when struck by a beam of light. The opening of these channels stimulates the corresponding brain cell. After inserting specially developed channels into the brains of mice, they were able to control the cells into which they had been added.  Then a hologram was projected on the top layer of the brain that resulted in numerous neurons getting activated many hundreds of times a second in an attempt to copy real brain activity. With this technique, the brain can be fooled into thinking that it has perceived something.

The mice experiment showed that the method can cause changes in brain activity while they also plan to mimic real brain activity patterns to eventually reproduce senses via the holographic system.

Moreover, as per Newsweek, the team hopes that they can scale-up their technique in the future to affect larger brain areas and thus, have a larger influence, and also downsize the large equipment required at present.