Tiny magnetically powered implant may be future of deep brain stimulation

> Scientists observed that the animals preferred to be in areas of their enclosures where a magnetic field activated the stimulator, and provided a small voltage to the reward center of their brains.

reminds me a little bit of the wires in Larry Niven's books (ringworld, et al), where Louis Wu is implanted with a wire into the pleasure center of his brain and becomes highly addicted.

if this is as non-invasive of a surgery as the article suggests, it could be the next avenue of "fun".

Whoa, this is potentially a pretty cool device. I don't have Parkinsons, but I do have Essential Tremor[0].

I'm only in my late 20's now but I've had it since at least my early teens, and it hasn't improved. In some ways it's possibly gotten a bit worse over time as well.

When I last saw a neurologist about it about ten years ago, they could really only recommend prescription medicine with nasty side-effects, so I decided with my parents at the time that improving the tremor at the cost of depression and other issues wouldn't be worth it.

I'm hopeful in the next decade or so there'll be something like this that could resolve it before it gets to the point where I'm unable to feed myself; I believe in the past there were companies that invented eating utensils for people with severe tremors, but that's not ideal.

[0] https://essentialtremor.org/

Straight to the point - stimulating reward center you can train any brain to willing perform any task. Human with such implant will do - and enjoy - whatever is the will of unit controlling the implant. The reward center is crutial in creatures self learning process.

Original Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2020.05.019

See DARPA'S N3 program for a variety of minimally invasive approaches to brain stimulation.

Why would this magnetic approach be better than using EMF to transmit power?

As a side note, I’m always super skeptical when I see links with small numbers of votes sitting on the front page (currently sitting at 12 votes and 0 comments). I always just assume it is the result of a voting ring or someone sharing the link with people to upvote directly instead of natural voting behavior.

Magnetic? No thanks. You go through an MRI and your brain turns to scrambled egg.