Envision ‘hacking’ your nervous system, prompt it, order an intervention

Mosaic science asks about the future

Can the Nervous System Be Hacked?

The nervous system — like  a computer terminal through which you can deliver commands to stop a problem, like acute inflammation, before it starts, or repair a body after it gets sick…

“What we’re trying to do here is completely novel,” says Pedro Irazoqui, a professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue University, where he’s investigating bioelectronic therapies… The biggest challenge is interpreting the conversation between the body’s organs and its nervous system… Glaxo has also established a $50 million fund to support the science of bioelectronics and is offering a prize of $1 million to the first team that can develop an implantable device that can, by recording and responding to an organ’s electrical signals, exert influence over its function.

Instead of drugs, “the treatment is a pattern of electrical impulses”… possible neural connections between the brain and the immune system… the idea of treating illness without drugs… the body’s C.P.U… the human brain’s circuitry, 100 billion neurons… focus on the peripheral nervous system, (the) peripheral nerves link the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) to the organs and limbs… bioelectronics calls for alliances between experts in fields that in many cases have little to do with medicine — nanotech, optics, electrical engineering, materials science, computer programming, wireless networking and data mining… “A patient gets a device implanted once for one disease, and they’re done… No prescriptions, no medicines, no injections. That’s the future.”

Is a new digital body category of #electroceuticals and #bioelectronics about to move from proof-of-concept to prototypes to engineering models?

DigiBody thinks so. Tune in for developments in the field.

#NextGenMed

 

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

What has over 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) and over 100 trillion synapses?

Your Brain

The human brain consists of approximately 100 billion neurons (which is as many cells as there are stars in the Milky Way)