Scientists at work on rewiring human brains

As the 9th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan approaches — it’s next Thursday — the Pentagon is funding new research to deal with the type of traumatic brain injuries often suffered by soldiers.

The Department of Defense has granted $1.44 million to a program run by Pedram Mohseni at Case Western Reserve University and Randolph J. Nudo at Kansas University Medical Center. The two have been working for three years already on a method of essentially rewiring the human brain to bypass the parts that have been damaged.

Mohseni and Nudo say that the brain already has a system of attempting to circumvent damaged areas, and the work they’re doing attempts to employ much of the same process of brain stimulation in order to help the brain help itself.

Also in this show, we talk to artist Nate Larson about Geolocation — his pairing of tweets and photos of the geographical locale where those tweets were tweeted. See a couple examples.