Sorting out what I’m going to write about each week can be a difficult situation.  Sometimes none of the scribbled ideas in my commonplace book strike my fancy, and none of the normal hiding places of strangeness on the internet have anything new.  The week drags by without anything that tips my fancy, at least not in the way that makes me want to research it.

But then weeks happen when one conversation is all that it takes to get the gears of my mind racing.  Sometimes it’s even less than one conversation, in fact, sometimes all it takes is a simple phrase.

The phrase this week?  Optogenetic stimulation. 

See, there’s a problem with the brain. Or at least, with studying it.  It’s a highly complex organism and, given how important it is to nearly every aspect of life, not one that people are usually comfortable messing with in experiments.  Most advances in early neuroscience were made when scientists studied people who had survived terrible brain injuries, essentially examining the end results of nature’s imprecise surgeries.  Other scientists worked backwards from certain neurological disorders, knowing that a patient had a problem like Cotard’s Syndrome or Schizophrenia and seeing if their brains were any different than supposedly healthy indviduals.

Even when scientists decided to experiment with animals it was difficult to precisely isolate variables enough to make a clear conclusion. Any stimulation of cells tended to stimulate quite a few neurons, making it difficult to determine just which neurons were actually causing the noted effect.  Electrodes activate entire sections of the brain with very little control, drugs affect many different parts.  Researchers had to spend half their time figuring out just how to activate specific neurons in the first place only to find their research stymied by varied results. 

But all of that’s changed in the last couple of years.  Thanks to optogenetic stimulation scientists can actually turn individual neurons on or off and can see what happens.  Just what is optogenetic stimulation?  Well… hold on to your seats, it’s about to get a little supervilliany in here.

Basically how it works is that mice are genetically engineered so that their neurons respond to light.  Genes from plants are inserted into their own genetic code, essentially making their neurons respond the same way that plants do to sunlight.  Once the genes are properly inserted scientists are able to turn these neurons on or off depending on the presence of light.

But, you may be thinking, surely there isn’t any light inside the skull, right? Well not usually.

Credit

Yep, that’s a mouse with a fiber optic cable in the middle of its head.  And while it seems incredibly odd the results that this process has already had have been astounding.

Not only do we now have remote controlled rats (I told you there was some supervilliany involved), but Luis de Lecea from Stanford University has been able to replicate the fragmented sleep that alcoholics, depressed patients, Alzheimer’s sufferers, and new parents have had to deal with and demonstrated just what its effects on health are.  Karl Deisseroth is exploring the way drugs work and reward their abusers, in order to figure out the best therapies.  Still other scientists are exploring new antidepressants.

So yes, it’s a little strange, and a little horrifying.  But it’s also freaking intriguing.