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OpenBCI

If your lower back hurts, you're in good company. Back pain inflicts itself on almost everyone during their lives. Merely there are some unlucky folk who become injured, or take a degenerative disorder or neuropathic status that leaves them in chronic pain. And for people who have pain doctors tin can't explain or really care for, things tin start looking pretty bleak. Hurting for the rest of my life, that I tin't change or relieve. Grand.

Then it may come as a bit of welcome news that in that location are scientists working on brain-computer interfaces capable of intercepting noise and cross-talk between neurons — with the net consequence that people who accept just been slogging through under the burden of invisible, intractable pain may exist able to take hold of a glimpse of light. And it'south a blink from the end of the tunnel, not the headlight of an oncoming train.

Back hurting can be classified in a few broad categories. There are disorders similar a slipped or "burst" disc, which tin result in runaway local inflammation that makes things worse over time. There are the class of disorders that come up from pinched or otherwise damaged nerves, such equally sciatica and other neuropathic pain. And then at that place are musculoskeletal disorders that are brought on or made worse past an injury to the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or the basic of the spine itself.

Merely in all these cases, in that location's this unpleasant inversion of a law of the body that makes things more than fragile and friable and inflamed, rather than audio and whole. We're often told that nerves can't regrow subsequently they're damaged. Merely that's not completely true. And it'southward a big part of the trouble hither.

Schematic_Examples_of_CNS_Structural_Changes_in_chronic_pain

Long-term chronic pain causes changes in the CNS. Schematic Examples of CNS Structural Changes. Red circles signify decreased gray matter density relative to controls. A. Subjects with chronic back pain show decreases in greyness thing density in bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and right inductive thalamus (adapted from [25]). B. Patients with fibromyalgia show decreases in cingulate cortex (CC), medial prefrontal cortex (Med. PFC), parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) and insula (adjusted from [27]). 3-D surface renderings were created using Freesurfer. Image and caption from 2007 chronic pain report past Borsook D, Moulton EA, Schmidt KF, Becerra LR.

It's truthful that we don't yet know how to reliably induce the proper growth and integration of neurons in the brain and spine — neurons of the central nervous organization. As far as we know, neurons aren't fungible, considering of their unique synaptic connections. But we can exert a little influence over the regrowth and development of peripheral neurons, the ones we experience and sense with.

For case, your sense of impact is intimately related to your sense of itch. Individual neuronal fibers carrying data about different stimuli — pressure, itch, vibration, temperature, and even pH or electric current — all get bundled into the aforementioned physiological nerve sheath, that acts like conduit carrying a bunch of cat5 cables. Each fiber carries different sensations, or different data. But one time they're all inside the nervus sheath, we call the whole shebang a "nerve." Some people get total awareness back in the afflicted region after an injury that amercement the nerves, while some others don't. With the right kind of physical therapy and rehab, though, information technology'due south surprising how well peripheral nerves can resume most of their role after terrible injuries.

But even with these successes, in that location are often problems with the way peripheral fretfulness reintegrate themselves into the body'southward nervous organization. After a back injury, a person can develop a thing called a glial scar that tin cause chronic pain with no known handling other than pain-relieving medications or fifty-fifty a rhizotomy, where they literally sever a spinal nervus and then it can't beam back pain signals.

And even with all our casual jokes nearly "I hope they gave you the adept stuff" afterward surgery, the kind of hurting relievers it takes to get even temporary relief from disabling pain are zip to express mirth at. They have their own deeply unpleasant side effects. Fentanyl, which is manna from heaven delivered intravenously earlier things like dental surgery or os grafts, is a common enough contaminant in heroin that it's causing a nationwide epidemic of overdose fatalities. And even after all these things, there are people who endure from intolerable hurting or itching or muscle cramping — in a phantom limb after amputation.

brain-CPU

Information technology would exist nice if we could exercise something that wasn't drugs to save the kind of pain that nothing else helps. Encephalon-computer interfaces might non exist the starting time matter that springs to mind when you're thinking of ways to make your back finish hurting, but they're starting to take something to say in this discussion. In January of this year, ClinicalTrials.gov approved a feasibility study on the use of implantable BCIs that could learn a patient's brainwaves, deduce what they were feeling, and convey that information to an external resource and then the patient could use it in a super-spiffy version of biofeedback therapy.

Similarly, IEEE published a study of an implantable BCI that could deduce what motion a patient was planning to make, interface with damaged neurons, then convey that information to other neurons associated with the implant. Patients who engaged in this study were able to mentally manipulate things similar a prosthetic, work an impaired limb distal to the damaged site, or fifty-fifty to finally work with a phantom limb.

And so there'south the report from just this spring, challenge to accept developed "a completely new technological approach toward BCIs aimed at reversing the maladaptive plasticity induced past musculoskeletal pain." Basically they argue that nerves can go conditioned to transmit pain signals, and that BCIs tin assistance reverse this modify. In summary, the authors said, "nosotros have developed a neurofeedback organisation for musculoskeletal hurting that is capable of providing rapid, accurate and reliable neurofeedback in dynamic conditions, assuasive the users to train their encephalon to reduce the pain." This amounts to interacting with the primal pain relief pathways currently used by endorphins and opiates.

BCIs even accept value in treating neuropathic pain — the idiosyncratic, infuriating, diffuse pain that many nerve injuries can leave behind.

All of these techniques rely on the concept of neuronal plasticity, the idea that nerves tin rewire themselves and restore their connections after injury. It'due south articulate that much more work needs to exist done in the field. Merely with all these advances, it won't be long earlier these devices start popping up out of startups and making their way into consumer easily…or brains.