A remote, ‘long-range’ and ‘large-volume’ mind control device has been unveiled in South Korea — with plans to use the tech for ‘non-invasive’ medical procedures.
Researchers with Korea’s Institute for Basic Science (IBS) developed the hardware, which manipulates the brain from a distance using magnetic fields, and tested the tech by inducing ‘maternal’ instincts in their female test subjects: mice.
In another test, they exposed a test group of lab mice to magnetic fields designed to reduce appetite, leading to a 10-percent loss in body-weight, or about 4.3 grams.
‘This is the world’s first technology to freely control specific brain regions using magnetic fields,’ according to the professor of chemistry and nanomedicine who helped spearhead the new effort.
That researcher, Dr Cheon Jinwoo, director of South Korea’s IBS Center for Nanomedicine said he expects the new hardware to be used for a variety of healthcare applications where he said it was sorely needed.
‘We expect it to be widely used in research to understand brain functions, sophisticated artificial neural networks, two-way brain-computer interface technologies, and new treatments for neurological disorders,’ Dr Cheon said.
But despite the science fiction quality of remote mind control, health experts noted that magnetic fields have been used successfully in medical imaging for decades.
‘The concept of using magnetic fields to manipulate biological systems is now well established,’ Dr Felix Leroy, a senior scientist at Spain’s Instituto de Neurociencias, wrote in an op-ed that accompanied the new study in Nature Nanotechnology.
‘It has been applied in various fields,’ he noted, ‘magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], transcranial magnetic stimulation, and magnetic hyperthermia for cancer treatment.’
The novelty added by South Korea’s IBS team was the genetic fabrication of specialized nanomaterials, whose role within neurons in the brain could be tuned from afar via carefully selected magnetic fields.
The technique, formally called magneto-mechanical genetics (MMG), guided Dr Cheon and his colleagues as they developed their brain-modulating technology.
In the new study, published this July in Nature Nanotechnology, the team called their invention Nano-MIND, for ‘Nano-Magnetogenetic Interface for NeuroDynamics.’
