When he was 20 years old, Rom Houben was involved in a car accident that left him completely paralyzed. The accident didn't place him in a coma, however, and he tried desperately to communicate with those around him, but to no avail. Dr. House may have recognized "locked-in" syndrome in a few minutes, but Houben's doctors spent 23 years believing their patient was a vegetable, leaving Houben to experience nothing outside the hospital soap operas playing out in his room (apparently, his nurses were frequent gossips).

How did this happen? Houben's doctors determined that he was in a coma using the Glasgow Coma Scale, a widely used system that evaluates eye movement and motor responses. The trouble is that while Houben's body was functioning like a coma patient, his cerebral cortex was still chugging along. It took a brain scan to reveal that Houben was still fully conscious, and he is currently able to communicate thanks to a keyboard that responds to the barest tremors he can coax from his right hand.

While one would hope Houben was the unlucky winner of a terrifying medical lottery, situations like his may not be rare. Neurologist Steven Laureys, who performed the revealing brain scan on Houben, says that in 40 percent of supposedly vegetative patients he examined, brain scans revealed some level of consciousness. Both Houben and Laureys are advocating that doctors lean less on the Glasgow Scale and look more toward brain scans.

Brain scan finds man was not in a coma—23 years later [CNET]

Reuters' FaithWorld blog has been covering the University of Pennsylvania's Neuroscience Boot Camp, going on now, and one message has become clear:

You can forget about the "God spot" that headline writers love to highlight (as in "‘God spot' is found in Brain" or "Scientists Locate ‘God Spot' in Human Brain"). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.

"There isn't a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data," said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. "It's not like there's a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is."

The image above shows two different brain scans, one from someone who is singing, and the other one from someone who is speaking in tongues. They look almost entirely identical, but you can just about glimpse a slight difference in blood flow to the frontal lobe, and specifically to the left caudate, among the "speaking in tongues" brains. (Thanks to The NeuroCritic for the image, and for pointing out that the study's authors admit their "results were hypothesis driven.")

The FaithBlog quotes neurological researcher Geoff Aguirre as pouring cold water on the idea that an fMRI scanner is like a mind reader, and calls the idea that you could use an fMRI to catch terrorists "science fiction, science fantasy." Adds Aguirre:

There's definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.

I also love his comments about "Cartesian dualism," in which people try to claim that someone's actions weren't his fault because "his brain did that." (As if he and his brain are two separate beings.)

[Reuters and The NeuroCritic]

1. We can erase people's memories.
Back in October a study was published in Neuron that proved an enzyme called CaMKII can erase bad memories while you recall them. In Dollhouse, the "actives" have their own memories erased first, and then new memories implanted. The brain-erasure technology is actually the cornerstone of the operation, as it's what turns the actives into blank slates ready to be reprogrammed. Right now, with the cooperation of desperate people, scientists could be using CaMKII to erase their old lives. Then they'll just need to implant new personalities and emotions.

2. We can regulate people's moods with microchips.
Right now, there are a series of implantable microchips on the market that send out electrical impulses over your nerves that can soothe a depressed person or reduce seizures. Some call them neurological pacemakers, and we are discovering new things about them every day - such as the fact that some can cause instant orgasm. Wipe somebody's brain, then install these brain pacemakers, and you might start shaping a whole new person by controlling what gives them pleasure and what makes them depressed.

3. We can use brain implants to steer animals left and right.
Several years ago, neuroscientists invented a little rat-sized brain implant that sent directional signals to the rodent's brain. Using a handheld remote, scientists sent electrical signals to the parts of the rats' brains connected to right and left whisker sensations - and could induce the rats to turn right or left at the press of a button. Dubbed the "robo-rat," the creatures could be used for complicated search and rescue efforts that require crawling into small places. Or they could be the beta version for a more nefarious technology implanted into humans' brains that would allow a corporation like the Dollhouse to remote-control an active's every move, right down to which street they turn on.

4. Infrared brain scans can predict what people want.
As we reported last week, researchers have discovered that a simple infrared brain scan can reveal patterns in brain activity that show simple preferences. Ask a person whether they'd rather have a dog or a cat, and this scan will give you the answer. This is the first step towards knowing how to shape people's preferences. If scientists could trigger a reaction in your brain that reversed the pattern, they might be able to turn a cat person into a dog person and vice versa.

5. Human-computer interfaces link human brains directly to computers.
You may have heard of BrainGate, a technology that uses electrodes sunk into your gray matter to convert electrical impulses from your brain into computer commands. It is currently used by people who are profoundly paralyzed to communicate by moving a cursor around. If we can open up communication between brain and computer like that, it stands to reason that the communication might be two-way. Who is to say there is no secret organization using a BrainGate-esque technology to reprogram people's thoughts?

A paper published this week in Britain’s Journal of Experimental Botany reports the find in China’s Xinjiang region, where many modern strains of cannabis are thought to have originated. In addition to 789 grams of marijuana, the tomb contained bridles, archery equipment, and a harp, apparent provisions for the afterlife. Unlike other early examples of cannabis use, the research team believes that the marijuana was included for its psychoactive properties. Said the lead researcher, neurologist Ethan Russo:

"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied."

Russo studies the effects of cannabis on the brain, including its use in pain management for multiple sclerosis and cancer patients. He and other researchers have been conducting a battery of tests on the ancient weed, such as attempting to measure the levels of THC and germinate the seeds found in the cache, in an attempt to better understand ancient uses of the plant.

[The Star]

To-Do List for Futurists: Become Posthuman

1. Today: Download the Rosetta@home program, and let your computer crunch data on protein shapes while you're not using it. Like the SETI@home program, Rosetta@home is designed to harness the power of thousands of PCs to take the data that scientists have gathered about how proteins in our bodies are shaped, and churn quickly through that data to figure out how we could design new proteins that might fight disease or turn us into posthuman, flying, megabrainiacs who don't need to sleep.

2. This week: Read all about what posthumans and transhumans want in James Hughes' fantastic book Citizen Cyborg.

3. This month: Volunteer to participate in neurological experiments at your local university. No, we don't want you to get the zapper, we just want you to volunteer to sit inside an MRI brain imaging machine and do various tasks so that neuroscientists can learn more about which parts of your brain are responsible for which activities. The more we understand the neurology of the brain, the better we'll be at preventing its degeneration through age or disease. And maybe we can get closer to those awesome Google brain implants. Most labs and universities have helpful websites that explain who can volunteer and how.

4. This month: Get a high-tech implant. Want to feel electro-magnetic waves? Get a magnet implanted in your finger. Want to be machine-readable? Get an RFID implanted under your skin. You can save all kinds of useful data on that RFID, but just be sure you keep it encrypted!

5. This year: Get your genome sequenced and donate the data to a public research institution. Companies like Knome and 23andMe will do it for some cash, and then you can take the data they get and give it to the International HapMap, an open database of genomic information used by researchers all over the world. The more data they amass about human genetic diversity, the sooner you can get a drug tailored specifically for you to cure your cancer, or make your legs move at super-speed.

Before this neuro-remapping technique gets into the wrong hands, scifi creators need to write some stories that warn us about the dangers. Let's see a movie or book about how torturers are using nerve-remapping to re-route all nerve sensation to one area, which they then shock and beat mercilessly. Or maybe they would just map their victim's legs to their arms and vice-versa, essentially making them unable to control their limbs properly and crippling them with fear?

This nerve-remapping could also be rewarding in the scariest possible way. You could reroute the nerves responsible to orgasm into somebody's trigger finger, so that every time they fired a gun they would get a burst of pleasure. Sort of like the mind-controlling Tasp weapon that Larry Niven invented for Ringworld. In that book, a group of aliens use the pleasure-inducing Tasp to condition everyone around them to enjoy obeying their orders.