THE next generation of neural implants might use lasers rather than electrodes to connect to the human nervous system. The technique is still in its infancy, but it holds out the promise of activating nerve fibres with exquisite precision.
The discovery that low-power pulses of near-infrared laser light can activate nerves was made by neurosurgeon Peter Konrad at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, together with his colleagues Anita Mahadevan-Jansen and her husband Duco Jansen. They repeated the classic 18th-century experiment of Luigi Galvani, using the laser pulses instead of electricity. “When we got a frog leg to twitch, I couldn’t…
