This week, the brain cells that make some rats thrill-seekers and others overcautious.

We could instantaneously convert them from risk-seeking to risk-averse.

And how to go from make-use dispose to make-use repair reuse.

Whatever I have, I try to figure out how long I can use it. And that's why I've

kept my first car from 1969, and I'm still driving it. Plus using magnets and radio waves to control

the activity of an animal's cells. In some of the studies we published earlier, we could just change the activity of a gene by literally

waving a magnet that was bought at a hardware store over the liver of an animal.

This is the nature podcast for March the 24th, 2016.

I'm Adam Levy.

And I'm Kerry Smith.

Scientists have known for a long time that changing the electrical activity of brain cells

affects their function. That's why electroshock therapy is still used to treat a range

of psychiatric disorders. But over the years we've got better and better at controlling

the electrical activity of specific regions of the brain.

To treat diseases like Parkinson's, for example, an electrode can be implanted to stimulate neurons

in a part of the brain. But the problem with methods like these is that they require permanent

implant in the brain, which is very invasive. Wouldn't it be great if you could just turn cells on and off with just a radio wave or a magnet?

Well, Jeffrey Friedman and collaborators at Rockefeller University in New York definitely thought so.

I called Jeffrey up to find out about their new approach.

So we've developed a method that allows you to control the activity of nerve cells

and other cells now using a magnetic field. The system takes advantage of two different components.

The first component is a channel known as TriPV1. TriPV1 is a receptor in your tongue and also nerve cells that

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