{"id":20163,"date":"2015-12-22T05:16:22","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T13:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/pulsed-laser-light-turns-whole-brain-activity-on-and-off"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:17:19","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:17:19","slug":"pulsed-laser-light-turns-whole-brain-activity-on-and-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/pulsed-laser-light-turns-whole-brain-activity-on-and-off","title":{"rendered":"Pulsed laser light turns whole-brain activity on and off"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/pulsed-laser-light-turns-whole-brain-activity-on-and-off.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al.\/eLife)<\/b><\/p>\n<p>By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Optogenetics\" target=\"_blank\">optogenetic<\/a> lasers at the brain\u2019s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the brain\u2019s sensory cortex and caused rats to enter a seizure-like state of unconsciousness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe hope to use this knowledge to develop better treatments for brain injuries and other neurological disorders,\u201d said Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and bioengineering at Stanford University, and a senior author of the study, published in the open-access journal <em>eLIFE<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/pulsed-laser-light-turns-whole-brain-activity-on-and-off\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al.\/eLife) By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) optogenetic lasers at the brain\u2019s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,1694,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-electronics","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68975,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20163\/revisions\/68975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}