Comment: "Hacking the soul" - How appropriate. You can imagine what all these new discoveries will be doing in the hands of the deep state. You can be sure that since these revelations are now in the public domain something far more advanced will have reached its zenith many years ago.
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"Optogenetics and other new techniques mean scientists can begin to pinpoint the function of the thousands of different types of neurons among the roughly 86 billion in the human brain."
he hypothalamus is a small structure deep in the
brain that, among other functions, coördinates sensory inputs—the
appearance of a rival, for example—with instinctual behavioral
responses. Back in the 1920s, Walter Hess of the University of Zurich
(who would win a Nobel in 1949) had shown that if you stuck an electrode
into the brain of a cat and electrically stimulated certain regions of
the hypothalamus, you could turn a purring feline into a furry blur of
aggression. Several interesting hypotheses tried to explain how and why
that happened, but there was no way to test them. Like a lot of
fundamental questions in brain science, the mystery of aggression didn’t
go away over the past century—it just hit the usual empirical
roadblocks. We had good questions but no technology to get at the
answers.
By 2010, Anderson’s Caltech lab had begun to tease apart the
underlying mechanisms and neural circuitry of aggression in their
pugnacious mice. Armed with a series of new technologies that allowed
them to focus on individual clumps of cells within brain regions, they
stumbled onto a surprising anatomical discovery: the tiny part of the
hypothalamus that seemed correlated with aggressive behavior was
intertwined with the part associated with the impulse to mate. That
small duchy of cells—the technical name is the ventromedial
hypothalamus—turned out to be an assembly of roughly 5,000 neurons, all
marbled together, some of them seemingly connected to copulating and
others to fighting.
“There’s no such thing as a generic neuron,” says Anderson, who
estimates that there may be up to 10,000 distinct classes of neurons in
the brain. Even tiny regions of the brain contain a mixture, he says,
and these neurons “often influence behavior in different, opposing
directions.” In the case of the hypothalamus, some of the neurons seemed
to become active during aggressive behavior, some of them during mating
behavior, and a small subset—about 20 percent—during both fighting and
mating.
That was a provocative discovery, but it was also a relic of
old-style neuroscience. Being active was not the same as causing the
behavior; it was just a correlation. How did the scientists know for
sure what was triggering the behavior? Could they provoke a mouse to
pick a fight simply by tickling a few cells in the hypothalamus?
A decade ago, that would have been technologically impossible. But in
the last 10 years, neuroscience has been transformed by a remarkable
new technology called optogenetics, invented by scientists at Stanford
University and first described in 2005. The Caltech researchers were
able to insert a genetically modified light-sensitive gene into specific
cells at particular locations in the brain of a living, breathing,
feisty, and occasionally canoodling male mouse. Using a hair-thin
fiber-optic thread inserted into that living brain, they could then turn
the neurons in the hypothalamus on and off with a burst of light.
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