Watch This Guy Control A Rat's Body With His Brain

Twitch, twitch.

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Via thedailywhat.tumblr.com

This video, taken as part of a study performed at Harvard Medical School, shows what you think it shows: an unmoving man using his brain to move a rat's tail. Here's how it works, roughly:

The implementation was aimed to non-invasively translate the human volunteer's intention to stimulate a rat's brain motor area that is responsible for the tail movement. The volunteer initiated the intention by looking at a strobe light flicker on a computer display, and the degree of synchronization in the electroencephalographic steady-state-visual-evoked-potentials (SSVEP) with respect to the strobe frequency was analyzed using a computer. Increased signal amplitude in the SSVEP, indicating the volunteer's intention, triggered the delivery of a burst-mode FUS (350 kHz ultrasound frequency, tone burst duration of 0.5 ms, pulse repetition frequency of 1 kHz, given for 300 msec duration) to excite the motor area of an anesthetized rat transcranially. The successful excitation subsequently elicited the tail movement, which was detected by a motion sensor.
Detected by a motion sensor, sure, but also your eyes, right here. Incredible.

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