Repurposing pharmateuticals and developments in prosthetic limbs.

It is well known that the human brain is a marvelously complex and flexible mechanism, capable of aggregating and processing information from our senses as well as ruminating and calculating based upon the results of other internal processes. It is so complex, in fact, that at this time we can't be sure of what its limits are or what's actually going on in there. People have built entire careers around studying emergent phenomena within the operation of the brain. The day to day operation of the human brain is so complex that it takes very little to tweak its functionality - change the concentration of a hormone one or two points in either direction, and entire modes of thought change. Primates have been eating (or not eating) various things for millennia to change how and what they think. Designer consciousness has long been a dream of transhumanists and psychologists - take a drug here, unlock a dormant function of the brain as long as the organism has a certain concentration of in circulation. An article published in the journal Frontiers In Systems Neuoscience in December of 2013 described a surprising discovery made by a group of neuroscientists: An anticonvulsant drug used to treat epilepsy called valproate seems to kickstart certain forms of critical period neuroplasticity after they are thought to have ended because the brain has matured. The experiments involved administering valproate to adults without musical training and then trying to teach them how to have perfect pitch. The study chose perfect pitch because there are, so far as is known, no cases of adult humans having successfully gained the ability through study or training. The data gathered by the research group reflects that the group of subjects who were administered valproate scored higher on note and pitch identification tests than the test group that was given a placebo instead, which strongly suggests that they were able to successfully reprogram one of their fundamental perceptual cortices (the auditory cortex), which ordinarily cannot be done after the onset of adulthood. While this seems kind of pointless the results imply some interesting things. First and foremost, if the auditory cortex can be successfully be reprogrammed then other parts of the brain probably can be as well under the proper conditions. Perhaps visual processing, textual recognition, or memory could be reprogrammed or enhanced; maybe the angular gyrus in the parietal lobe can be reworked to have a greater facility for mathematics. This particular experiment has implications for the acquisition of new spoken languages, in particular tonal languages which are considered by many to be the most difficult to become proficient in. One of the big drawbacks of prosthetic limbs is that they don't really have a sense of touch. For example, someone using a prosthetic hand cannot tell if they are holding something in the gripper without looking at it. Nor can the wearer determine how strongly the gripper is holding something because the sense of tactile feedback is simply not there. Microcontrollers and clever arrangements of springs and servomotors in the limbs are designed so that enough friction is generated by the gripper to hold most small objects. This is why adding a sense of touch to newer models of prosthetic hands represents a substantial breakthrough. Dennis Sorensen, age 36, lost his left hand in an accident nine years ago. In a surgical procedure carried out in Rome surgeons patched into four sensory nerve trunks in his left arm, and connected them to the electrical actuators in his prosthetic that move the fingers. As the actuators move the fingers of his prosthetic hand they register a certain amount of strain and resistance, and that measurement (probably represented as varying voltage) is transmitted into those sensory nerves. End result: Sorensen was able to feel something in his left hand for the first time in nearly a decade. He was able to recognize the shapes and textures of objects held in his prosthetic hand without looking at them, and characterized the sensations as almost natural. The electrode implants had to be removed within a month to comply with human testing safety protocols due to the risk inherent in running wires through holes in the skin but the data