The real Batman? Scientists find ultrasound can give humans ‘super-senses’

Bats guide themselves through the night using ultrasound - but scientists have discovered that the sounds, above the frequencies humans can hear, can give humans genuine ‘super-powers’.

The sound waves, used to scan babies pre-birth, can boost human senses if a targeted ‘beam’ is fired into the human brain - aiming at a tiny area of brain tissue the researchers described as ‘the size of an M&M’.

The beams briefly give people super-senses - and could boost other areas of our brains, or even lead to new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

A beam of ultrasound, fired through the skull, had measurable and rapid effects on the target’s senses, allowing them to feel puffs of air on their hands with more accuracy - and pass two tests showing that their senses had briefly become ‘superhuman’.

The experiment surprised the scientists - and could lead to further techniques where ultrasound beams ‘boost’ the human brain’s abilities.

Ultrasound is well-known, easily controlled - and could represent a new frontier in controlling, or even ‘supercharging’ the brain, the researchers said.

‘"This finding represents a new way of noninvasively modulating human brain activity with a better spatial resolution than anything currently available,” said William "Jamie" Tyler, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
   
"Ultrasound has great potential for bringing unprecedented resolution to the growing trend of mapping the human brain's connectivity," said Tyler. "So we decided to look at the effects of ultrasound on the region of the brain responsible for processing tactile sensory inputs."
   
The scientists delivered focused ultrasound to an area of the cerebral cortex that processes sensory information received from the hand.

They placed a small electrode on the wrist of human volunteers and recorded their brain responses using electroencephalography, or EEG. Then, just before stimulating the nerve, they began delivering ultrasound to the targeted brain region.
   
The subjects receiving ultrasound showed significant improvements in their ability to distinguish pins at closer distances and to discriminate small frequency differences between successive air puffs.
   
"Our observations surprised us," said Tyler. "Even though the brain waves associated with the tactile stimulation had weakened, people actually got better at detecting differences in sensations."

"In neuroscience, it's easy to disrupt things," said Tyler. "We can distract you, make you feel numb, trick you with optical illusions. It's easy to make things worse, but it's hard to make them better. These findings make us believe we're on the right path."
   
"That means we can use ultrasound to target an area of the brain as small as the size of an M&M," Tyler said. "This finding represents a new way of noninvasively modulating human brain activity with a better spatial resolution than anything currently available."

The scientists now believe that ultrasound could allow safer and more controllable ways to ‘control’ the flow of information within the brain than either magnetism or electrical pulses - possibly leading to ways to cure or control psychiatric or neurodegenerative diseases.
   
"This will help us make more precise maps of the richly interconnected synaptic circuits in the human brain," said Wynn Legon, the study's first author and a postdoctoral scholar at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

"We hope to continue to extend the capabilities of ultrasound for noninvasively tweaking brain circuits to help us understand how the human brain works."
   
Michael Friedlander, executive director of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and a neuroscientist who specializes in brain plasticity. "This approach is providing the technology and proof of principle for precise activation of neural circuits for a range of important uses -  including potential treatments for neurodegenerative disorders, psychiatric diseases, and behavioral disorders.

“Moreover, it arms the neuroscientific community with a powerful new tool to explore the function of the healthy human brain, helping us understand cognition, decision-making, and thought.