A team of scientists has cured a brain disorder in adult mice by rebooting the rodents' brains and allowing them to rewire themselves.
Take this tiny, very cute welding device and rewire your gray mass, Mickey. We'll reboot it, because the brain is a lot like a Nintendo Entertainment System, despite lacking a zapper.
The research demonstrates that certain features of young brains can be recreated in mature brains, even in parts of older brains that scientists believed were impervious to change.
"I am Tradition Man! Radiation from your yellow sun has made me impervious to change!"
It could also pave the way for treating a variety of developmental disorders that begin relatively early in life.
Soon we can use dangerous neurological interventions to finally put an end to "boys will be boys."
The brain continues to change throughout life, but it grows more and more difficult to break certain kinds of connections as time passes.
Decades of weekend alcoholism might also play a small role.
But Sunil Gandhi and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, have found a way to hit the reset button in certain regions of the brain even later in life, allowing the organ to rewire itself and iron out the kinks that can lead to disorders.
I imagine this failing and your brain flashing the biological version of the VCR clock 12:00 AM over and over while you become a hopeless drooling vegetable.
The research was funded by a grant from the High-Risk, High-Reward program at the National Institutes of Health.
This is the same group that funded such studies as "Stealing from drug lords" and "Expressing popular, but forbidden, political opinions."
In their study, the scientists implanted special cells into the brains of adult mice that suffered from a disease called amblyopia, sometimes called lazy eye.
Sometimes also called "You could hunt eagles and squirrels at the same time."
Amblyopia is not a problem with the eye itself, but usually results instead from a problem in the connection between the eye and the brain.
You mean it's me noggin and not me peepers?
"I have to say it was mind blowing," Gandhi said.
Not literally, one would hope.
"I began these experiments with colleagues about eight years ago, and all throughout we were subject to concern that this enterprise we were engaged in was far fetched."
I lost everything because I believed lazy eye could be cured by resetting the neocortex, but now I've been fully vindicated.
"The neuroscientist has a default expectation that it is not possible to wire in [to the neocortex] like that," Gandhi said. "It's kind of like a Black Swan phenomenon, that now that we have the evidence, a lot of people will treat it as obvious, but I can tell you that there is a long list of my senior colleagues that thought this was impossible."
Lots of old people with their time ravaged neocortexes thought it wouldn't work, but they were wrong, of course.
"With all potential therapies involving placing cells in the brain, one has to be very cautious," Gandhi said.
So please, put down that ice cream scoop and live wire.
Thank you for fixing my cross-eyes, Camille.
"But what we hope is that this study, along with many others, begins to open the door to the therapeutic viability of cell-based approaches."
As a man of science, I like to use my powerful hoping abilities.
Komment Korner
Note: will not be effective on republican cowards.
*Yawn* Another day, another incredible age reversing breakthrough in...MICE.
Mandatory brain resets for all liberals.
Walk this way. No, THIS way.
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