[frankinstien]

Reading up on how some researchers are monitoring brain activity at a neural level in living animals I ran into Optical Electrophysiology It's literally monitoring actual neural firings of individual neurons and they can trace the innervation between neurons to see them interact as gated switches, and interact with the neurons to cause them to fire or inhibit them! 

And here's a video abstract of a paper of experiments using a mouse. Don't worry the mouse wasn't killed.

[frankinstien]

For some reason, I just can't sleep, so I did a google search and actually found a better paper that explains optogenetics for neural applications. Enjoy...

[frankinstien]

Here's another very good paper on using optical technology.