neurodudes

This study claims that glucose metabolism in the brain goes up near a cellphone antenna. At first blush this may appear to conflict with other studies that claim that cellphones don’t cause cancer, but this can be resolved by supposing that cell phones don’t cause cancer, but affect the brain in other ways. As Volkow notes at the end of the Nytimes article, this may lead to the discovery of a mechanism for brain stimulation. Right now they don’t know what the mechanism is by which the electromagnetic field is causing the glucose metabolism. If neuronal firing is being altered, and if the bandwidth turns out to be sufficiently high (i.e. if the stimulation can be made sufficiently precise), this could eventually lead to a wireless brain-machine interface/neural prosthetic.

Nora D. Volkow, Dardo Tomasi, Gene-Jack Wang, Paul Vaska, Joanna S. Fowler, Frank Telang, Dave Alexoff, Jean Logan, Christopher Wong. Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism. JAMA. 2011;305(8):808-813.

Summary in NYtimes: Cellphone Use Tied to Brain Changes