For motor functions, for instance, the flow was taken to be from the centre towards the muscles at the extremities, so artificial electrical stimulation needed to be in the same direction.
Equally, the effect of electrical stimulation need not be univalent, perhaps differentially affecting local nucleus accumbens processing and remote cortical connectivity as others have suggested (Figee et al., 2013).
In the title story, another old woman, a white South African widow "attempting to fight off oblivion," needs electrical stimulation to recover her fading memories, and some kind of science-fiction device to keep from losing them again.
Further research into where, how, and when to deliver electrical stimulation in the brain is needed to maximize benefit from these new strategies to treat epilepsy.
Kharbanda et al. were the first to demonstrate that the application of an RIPC stimulus without the need for electrical stimulation, reduced the extent of myocardial infarction in-vivo in pigs, and also attenuated endothelial injury in humans [ 8].
Were recipients to lose their residual hearing in the future, the cochlea would then have adequate coverage with a standard length array in the electrical stimulation only situation and obviate the need for reimplantation with a full length electrode at a later time as seen in some situations [ 54, 55].
Hence, an external source to apply electrical stimulation or implantation of electrodes is not needed.
Much of this work was motivated by the practical need to determine safe electrical stimulation parameters when designing human neural prosthetic devices.
Further studies are needed to ascertain whether electrical stimulation through the cochlear implant can prevent further degeneration of auditory nerve fibres at an early stage of the disease.
In addition to mechanical stimuli commonly arising in tissue engineering context, electrical stimulation or even combined approaches incorporating electrical/mechanical cues need to be provided in vitro for obtaining an appropriate functionality of engineered tissue.
