Alan Robert Mardinly – Postdoctoral Fellow At University California Berkely – Using Holograms To Edit Brain Activity

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2018

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Optogenetics is big news in neuroscience and could potentially change the lives of millions of humans who have lost sensations in parts of their bodies due to nerve damage or the loss of limbs even. Neurons in the brain work together to harvest thoughts and behaviors. Optogenetics is a technique used in biology using the combination of genetics and light to control events within these precise cells of living tissues. This technique allows scientists to casually manipulate cells and activate them directly.
In this interview UC Berkeley Postdoctoral Fellow, Alan Robert Mardinly, shares the research and development UC Berkeley neuroscientists are working on to build equipment using a holographic approach on the brain which activates or suppresses a group of neurons all at once to stimulate brain activity and insert false sensations. Essentially this manipulates it into thinking it has felt, seen or sensed something.
Based on the activity which is closely being monitored, researchers then decide which neurons to activate to simulate those patterns again in order to substitute missing sensations. This groundbreaking technology could change the lives of anyone who has lost a limb or feeling in parts of their body due to severe nerve damage, for example.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:07.6	Future Technologies are always to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast.
0:13.2	Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.
0:17.8	We're just around the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing,
0:22.6	blockchain, virtual reality, and more.
0:25.6	Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech Podcast. My guest is Alan Robert
0:32.6	Mardinley. He is a postdoctoral fellow at University of Berkeley. And we're going to be talking about his work as research on optogenetics and neuroscience.
0:41.3	Alan, how you doing?
0:42.2	Very good.
0:42.9	Good to be with you.
0:43.7	Yeah, thank you.
0:44.6	So, you know, let's start out listeners just with the, what are the basics of what you're researching, what's the whole premise?
0:50.0	Yeah, well, the basic premise is the technology called optogenetics, which your listeners
0:56.0	may be familiar with, because it's been fairly big news in neuroscience over the last 10 years.
1:00.7	And basically, what this lets us do is use light to control the activity of specific types
1:06.0	of neurons.
1:07.4	Before optogenetics, if you wanted to try to figure out what some population of neurons was doing in the brain,
1:13.6	you had to basically record the signals from those neurons at the same time that you're recording some behavior of the animal.
1:21.6	And then at the end, you sort of do some analysis and you try to correlate the two together.
1:25.6	What optogenetics does is give you the ability to actually caus to correlate the two together. What Optogenetics does is give you
1:28.0	the ability to actually causally manipulate the activity of the cells. So rather than just
1:34.2	watching the cells as you behave, you can actually activate the cells directly and see if it causes
	...

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