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![(From L) Marc, a French patient suffering from parkinson's disease, fitted with a new neuroprosthesis, walks in front of Swiss Professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and Lausanne University (UNIL) and co-director of NeuroRestore, Gregoire Courtine, project manager Tomislav Milekovic, project manager and head of Parkinson's activities at NeuroRestore, Eduardo Martin Moraud, swiss neurosurgeon professor and co-director of NeuroRestore Jocelyne Bloch, in Lausanne, on November 3, 2023. Neuroscientists from Inserm, CNRS and the University of Bordeaux in France, together with Swiss researchers and neurosurgeons (EPFL/CHUV/UNIL), have designed and tested a 'neuroprosthesis' designed to correct the walking problems associated with Parkinson's disease. (Photo by GABRIEL MONNET / AFP) / "The erroneous mention appearing in the metadata of this photo by GABRIEL MONNET has been modified in AFP systems in the following manner: [Marc] instead of [Marc Gautier]. Please immediately remove the erroneous mention[s] from all your online services and delete it (them) from your servers. If you have been authorized by AFP to distribute it (them) to third parties, please ensure that the same actions are carried out by them. Failure to promptly comply with these instructions will entail liability on your part for any continued or post notification usage. Therefore we thank you very much for all your attention and prompt action. We are sorry for the inconvenience this notification may cause and remain at your disposal for any further information you may require." (Photo by GABRIEL MONNET/AFP via Getty Images)](https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/tdtK0Xv4W3J2gC_fTGeOZg--~B/Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTQ2ODtweW9mZj0wO3c9ODMyO2FwcGlkPXl0YWNoeW9u/https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2023-11/5a0bb180-7cd8-11ee-af7e-830ba71eb29d.cf.jpg)
Spinal implant allows Parkinson’s patient to walk for miles
A Parkinson’s patient can now walk 6km (3.7 miles) thanks to an implant targeting the spinal cord. The man, 62-year-old “Marc” from Bordeaux, France, developed severe mobility impairments from the degenerative disease.
Schizophrenic computer may help us understand similarly afflicted humans
Although we usually prefer our computers to be perfect, logical, and psychologically fit, sometimes there's more to be learned from a schizophrenic one. A University of Texas experiment has doomed a computer with dementia praecox, saddling the silicon soul with symptoms that normally only afflict humans. By telling the machine's neural network to treat everything it learned as extremely important, the team hopes to aid clinical research in understanding the schizophrenic brain -- following a popular theory that suggests afflicted patients lose the ability to forget or ignore frivolous information, causing them to make illogical connections and paranoid jumps in reason. Sure enough, the machine lost it, and started spinning wild, delusional stories, eventually claiming responsibility for a terrorist attack. Yikes. We aren't hastening the robot apocalypse if we're programming machines to go mad intentionally, right?
Study shows love for music relates to brain chemical, not to My Chemical Romance
It would make sense that people listen to music for the sheer pleasure of it, right? That's what we thought, but apparently there's a scientific reason for this. Scientists have discovered that when Earthlings listen to pleasurable music, one particular chemical is loosed in the gord. The study, conducted by Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, concluded that when the participants tuned into instrumental pieces they were familiar with, their brains released dopamine into the striatum -- an area of the noggin linked with anticipation and predictions. According to PET scans, the members of the study unleashed the chemical 15 seconds before a climaxical moment in a song, signaling the possibility that humans may actually release it in anticipation and not as a reaction to a wailing solo. Bonus point? Chopped and screwed tracks unleashed forty times more dopamine. Just kidding, but it's probably true.
