brain

Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink on Thursday said the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given the green light to its first-in-human clinical trial, a critical milestone after earlier struggles to gain approval.The FDA nod "represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people," Neuralink said in a tweet. It did not elaborate on the aims of the study, saying only that it was not recruiting yet and more details would be available soon.Neuralink and the FDA did not…

Seven years after its launch, Elon Musk’s Neuralink company has finally secured approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implant a computer inside a human brain. “We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study,” Neuralink tweeted on Thursday. “This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people.”…

It’s a classic science fiction trope: Astronauts on an interstellar journey are kept in sleek, refrigerated pods in a state of suspended animation. Although such pods remain purely fictional, scientists have pursued research into inducing a hibernation-like state in humans to lessen the damage caused by medical conditions such as heart attacks and stroke, and to reduce the stress and costs of future long-distance space sojourns. In a study published today in…

“A patient should not have to undergo forcible explantation of a device,” says Nita Farahany, a legal scholar and ethicist at Duke University in North Carolina, who has written a book about neuro rights.  “If there is evidence that a brain-computer interface could become part of the self of the human being, then it seems that under no condition besides medical necessity should it be allowed for that BCI to be explanted without the consent of the human user,” says Ienca. “If that is constitutive of the person, then you’re…

There are times when hibernating would be useful, like surgery or space travel, and we’re getting closer to being able to do so on demand in humans. Scientists have now demonstrated a way to induce a hibernation-like state in mice and rats using non-invasive ultrasound pulses to the brain.Torpor is a sleep-like state that animals such as mice and birds can go into to conserve energy, by bringing their body temperature and metabolism right down. It’s thought to be a survival mechanism for when food is scarce, allowing them…

Anyone who has managed to clock in hundreds of hours on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild since its 2017 release will understand well how, over time, you can’t help but develop a constellation of habits and preferences that end up defining your individual playstyle. In the same way that there was no one “right” way to progress through Breath of the Wild’s story, the game gave you the freedom to figure out how you wanted to move through the world, and those two things alone made it unlike any other Zelda title in the…

By Hebrew SeniorLife, Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research May 25, 2023A recent study reveals that the ability to multitask while walking, such as walking and talking, starts to decline around the age of 55, with this decline linked to changes in cognition and brain function rather than physical ability. The researchers suggest that poor performance in such dual-task walking in middle age might indicate accelerated brain aging or a pre-symptomatic neurodegenerative condition, and that this simple test…

Using a brain implant that can record neural signals over many months, my research team and I have discovered objective biomarkers of chronic pain severity in four patients with chronic pain as they went about their daily lives.Pain is one of the most important and basic subjective experiences a person can have. While there is plenty of evidence that perception of pain takes place in the brain, there is also a major knowledge gap regarding where and how pain signals are processed in the brain.Even though pain is…

A pair of implants forming a digital bridge between the brain and the spinal cord has enabled a 'test pilot' patient to better stand and walk again, showing promise for an innovation that could one day transform the lives of individuals with paralysis.Led by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the investigation involved a 40-year-old man named Gert-Jan, who had been paralyzed by a biking accident over a decade ago.Gert-Jan had previously regained some ability to walk with the help…

Gert-Jan Oskam lost the ability to walk in 2011 when he injured his spine in a cycling accident in China. Six years later, the Dutch man managed to take a few short steps thanks to a small array of electrodes implanted on top of his spinal cord that delivered nerve-stimulating pulses of electricity. The device allowed him to walk, but the process was stilted and sometimes frustrating. Today in Nature, an international team of researchers reports giving Oskam a…