Portugal — Amílcar Silva-dos-Santos, a Portugal based Psychiatric physician at the Hospital Vila Franca de Xira, Grupo José de Mello Saúde, in Portugal, a former visiting scholar at the Neurobiology Department of Duke University, NC, USA, and currently a researcher at Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon, Portugal, this week released a groundbreaking medical research paper in which he raised the hypothesis of connecting two spinal cords for sharing information between two nervous systems.

Intent to find out answers regarding shared information and nervous system functionality throughout the paper’s hypothesis, it is discussed possible applications to treat paraplegic patients, as well as prepared for application in the field of psychiatry, too.

“Direct communication between different nervous systems has been recently reported through Brain-to-Brain-Interfaces,” said Silva-dos-Santos. “Closed loops systems between a brain and the spinal cord from the same individual have also been demonstrated. However, the connection between different nervous systems through spinal cord has not yet been considered — until now.”

The paper raises the hypothesis of connecting two spinal cords as an indirect means of communication of two brains and a direct way of communication between two nervous systems. To test this hypothesis, a protocol for connecting two spinal cords with a specific wire is introduced. Additionally, the idea of a connection between two parts of the same spinal cord to treat a paraplegic patient is also introduced.

Discussions of external information injected into a spinal cord as well as the spinal cord connection can become tools to study the physiology of the nervous system, modeling specific behaviors, study and modeling disease traits, treating neuropsychiatric disorders, and information sharing between two nervous systems.

“I encourage everyone in the spinal cord, nervous system, and psychiatric fields as well as in the biotechnology industries to give this newly published paper a glance for improved medical application,” said Silva-dos-Santos.

For more information, visit:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00105/full

Contact:
Amílcar Silva-dos-Santos
Department of Psychiatry, Hospital Vila Franca de Xira
R. do Parque Res. dos Povos 1, 2600-009, Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal.
[email protected]