a sensory substitution device allows rats to perceive infrared light with your sense of touch

is 1968, and a blind man sitting in a dentist's chair in the center of Pacific Medical in San Francisco. But it is not there to fill a check or, and this is not a normal chair. The file was equipped with 400 metal rods that vibrate, arranged in a matrix of 20 x 20, and right next to a television camera that sits atop a large tripod. Man uses a handle to rotate the camera around the room, as it does, images of the camera becomes a model of vibrations gently press into the skin of his back, like a great pinscreen

Through training, the man learns to distinguish the following horizontal, vertical and diagonal, and to identify and discriminate objects. It is one of the six subjects who participated in an early manifestation of sensory substitution, bypassing the loss of a sense of the power of their information to the brain from another sensory pathway. Now, researchers at Duke University Medical School have used these principles to give exactly the same rats, the ability to perceive infrared light through their sense of touch, and use it to find water.

Miguel Nicolelis and his colleagues are in the forefront of efforts to neural prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces (BCI) for people with spinal cord injury or disease such as Parkinson's disease. The key is to understand how populations of cells in the motor cortex encode information about the planning and execution of movements. Type BCI records these signals, decodes and translates them into commands for a robot arm or other external device. This technology is still in its infancy, but it is more sophisticated for the day - for example, Nicolelis and his colleagues have recently announced that they have developed a prosthesis that can save about 2,000 neurons simultaneously.

In this latest study, the researchers placed the rats in a circular chamber containing three water ports, each with an LED visible and invisible infrared LED, and then trained to poke their noses into them when to light a sip of water. Then, electrodes implanted in the brain of rats, and connected to infrared sensors mounted on the heads of animals.

Aa electrodes led the primary somatosensory cortex, the first of several brain regions that process tactile information from the skin. In the human brain, is largely devoted to the face and hands, which are the most sensitive parts of the body. In rodents, is largely devoted to processing tactile information mustaches. However, while being arranged in a highly ordered, with adjacent parts of the body and barbs are represented by spots of adjacent tissues.

rats adapted to their new city after a month, and I learned to use it to discriminate between ports to get a drink. The device stimulates the mustache area of ??the brain where infrared light came within reach, but at the beginning, the rats did not associate it with the task of finding water, and put on random ports. Gradually, however, it was revealed that the stimulation frequency corresponds to the intensity of infrared light, and increased with the approach of its source, and to use this information to guide you to the correct port in response infrared light. Thus, the animals have learned to detect the infrared light through their sense of touch, and go to it. It is likely that electrical stimulation evoked sensations that are similar or identical to those that occur when the hair is deflected by objects.

Thomson, E. E.

et al
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