The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Controlling the Brain Let's think outside the box National Science Foundation

Traumatic brain injuries affect as many as 20 percent of warfighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the Pentagon's whiz kids at DARPA have turned to optogenetic brain implants that use light pulses to control brain cells, and hopefully reroute brain activity, Wired's Danger Room reports.

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

9 Comments

Anything to help repair damage done.

This sounds awfully experimental and I hope its only used when no other option is available.

talkingdesktop_com

REPLACE mental function? So if a veteran starts to think something like "I am not getting proper care from the VA" ZAP! "Oh! What was I thinking?"

Do the implants resemble the old Lancets of the 16th century? Because the ocean is vast and not completely understood but and are the test patients?

and who are the test patients?

If ever I suffer some kind of brain injury, the first organization I would want implanting things into it would be DARPA -- what about you?
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Back when I had an Apple IIgs, I would open up the case and use a safety pin to make random connections between circuits, just to see what would happen. Once, my modem speaker became an AM radio receiver.

What fun DARPA will be having. :)

Hmmmmm... DARPA trying to help out injured soldiers via Brain Implants. Sounds cool, but I just cannot help but believe there are other uses for Brain Implants that would interest DARPA even more. Such as:
1. Brain Implants that can turn off the pain receptors. Now this would be cool! A soldier with his guts blown to bits, missing an arm still rushing up the hill to kill his enemy!
2. Brain Implants to instill a sense of LOYALTY. No more brainwashing needed in bootcamp. Now a small implant can make a soldier loyal to every command his superior gives.
3. Brain Implants to suppress fear. Nothing to fear but fear itself and now even that is no longer feared!
4. And lastly, let's use the Brain Implants to train specified neural nets a secret task. But let's do all the training at nighttime while the soldier is asleep and all his other functions are disabled. It will simply appear as a reoccurring dream to the soldier. And then when we want, we can activate those neural nets during his conscious hours and bingo, we now have a soldier that has the impulse to accomplish the task we trained him to do. Now you (or DARPA) can determine what that task shall be!

Surely DARPA has enough brain power to see the value of these applications I have listed. OR could it be that maybe just maybe they already have???

My bet is that these and many other reasons are more important to DARPA than helping soldiers recover from brain trauma!

-mostinsane

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