Biomedical engineers at the Duke University's Pratt School of
Engineering have claimed that rapid-fire electrical pulses
strengthen the ability of brain "pacemakers" to reduce symptoms
in people with Parkinson’s disease. Brain "pacemakers" are
devices that use deep brain stimulation to drown out the
irregular bursts of brain activity characteristic to the
disease. According to the research, the rapid-fire pulses can
create an "information lesion," or information barrier, that
acts similarly to an actual surgical lesion used to treat
neurological conditions. “Periodic bursts in the brains of
people with tremor – which might follow a pattern such as ‘pop-
pop-pop, silence, pop-pop-pop, silence’ - propagate pathological
information within brain circuits. If you replace that instead
with a constant ‘pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop,’ you have erased that
pathological information,” said Warren Grill, the study's lead
investigator. The Department of Environmental and Occupational
Medicine at Aberdeen University Medical Schoo