"Neuroscience and Bioengineering" via Brandon in Google Reader

Brain Surgeon

2009-07-04T20:17:02Z

Comedy sketch show starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Brain Scanning May Be Used In EU Security Checks

2009-05-12T12:59:00Z

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify identities for security checks. The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects." The same article says that "The Home Office, meanwhile, has confirmed rapid expansion plans of automated facial recognition gates: 10 will be operating at major UK airports by August." I wonder what Bruce Schneier would have to say about such elaborate measures.

Stem Cell Contact Lenses Cure Blindness in Less Than a Month [Science]

2009-06-03T18:00:00Z

Here's something that people with poor or no vision will be excited about: three patients had their sight restored in less than a month by contact lenses cultured with stem cells.

All three patients were blind in one eye. The researchers extracted stem cells from their working eyes, cultured them in contact lenses for 10 days, and gave them to the patients. Within 10 to 14 days of use, the stem cells began recolonizing and repairing the cornea.

Of the three patients, two were legally blind but can now read the big letters on an eye chart, while the third, who could previously read the top few rows of the chart, is now able to pass the vision test for a driver's license. The research team isn't getting over excited, still remaining unsure as to whether the correction will remain stable, but the fact that the three test patients have been enjoying restored sight for the last 18 months is definitely encouraging. The simplicity and low cost of the technique also means that it could be carried out in poorer countries.

This is incredible and potentially game changing. It's stuff like this that makes you realize that we live in the future, and it's awesome. [UNSW via The Australian via GizMag]

Human inner ear models for universal radio chip

2009-06-03T22:32:39Z

The human ear is an amazingly effective receiver. The ear can pick up a wide range of frequencies, from the deepest rumble to a high-pitched whine. An MIT professor realized what a unique and perfect model for a radio chip that could function as a universal wireless device to pick up a wide range of electrical signals.

Professor Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his graduate student, Soumyajit Mandal recreated the elements of the human ear, down to the hairs that line the cochlea using electronics. Transistors for the hairs, inductors for the fluids in the ear, and capacitors for the membranes. The resulting "RF cochlea chip" is just 1.5mm by 3mm and it picks up FM radio, Internet, cellphone and TV signals. It uses 100 times less power than previous analyzers and is faster than any other RF spectrum analyzer. The speed makes it desirable as a universal radio to selectively receive a broad range of frequencies.

Considering his background is creating voice synthesis chips, this is a natural. Will the RF chip hear what his speech chip says?

MIT via Fast Company

Classic neuroscience papers

2009-06-03T09:28:05Z

Society for Neuroscience provides access to a sample of high impact classic papers addressing a range of neuroscience topics.

SfN's 2008 annual report

2009-06-03T09:33:58Z

The Annual Report provides an overview of SfN accomplishments, efforts and activities for FY2008.

Synchronized Brain Waves Focus Our Attention

2009-05-28T18:09:52Z

Separate brain regions firing in unison may be what keeps us focused on important things while we ignore distractions.

A deluge of visual information hits our eyes every second, yet we’re able to focus on the minuscule fraction that’s relevant to our goals. When we try to find our way through an unfamiliar area of town, for example, we manage to ignore the foliage, litter and strolling pedestrians, and focus our attention on the street signs.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the brain’s control center syncs up to its visual center with high-frequency brain waves, directing attention to select features of the visual world.

“It’s been known that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in focusing our attention, but the mystery was how,” said neuroscientist Robert Desimone, who led the study, published in Science Friday. “Now we have some insight into how it has that focusing role — through this synchrony with our sensory systems.”

This novel understanding of attention may inform future studies on disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD, in which patients are easily distracted and the prefrontal cortex is thought to be impaired. The region’s newly discovered role as a source of synchronized brain activity may be crucial to understanding these diseases.

Previous research showed that when something important (such as a street sign) catches our attention, the sign-processing neurons in the visual region begin to fire in unison. The rest of the neurons in the region fire too, stimulated by other information that hits the eye, but they chatter out of sync with one another. The synchronized firing of neurons carrying the important aspects of the visual field is thought to focus our attention to these features.

“If there’s a group of people that’s chanting in the middle of a large crowd having random conversations, the chanters stand out,” Desimone said.

What wasn’t known is what gets the chanters going in the first place. Neuroscientists knew the control center, known as the prefrontal cortex, was involved, but it is on the opposite side of the brain from the visual center, so it was unclear how such long-range interactions might actually operate.

First, Desimone’s team recorded the activity of neurons in two monkeys while the animals focused on images on a computer screen. They found that, as expected, neurons in the visual area began firing together when the monkeys looked at the images. But they discovered that neurons in a region of the prefrontal cortex were also firing in unison, and at the same frequency as those in the visual area.

When they took a closer look at their data, they found that the prefrontal region started firing 80 milliseconds after the monkeys were cued to focus on the image, while the visual cortex started firing after 130 milliseconds. The two regions, on opposite sides of the brain, then fired at a high frequency in synchrony with one another. The waves were offset by 8 to 13 milliseconds, which the authors believe may be the time it takes for a signal to travel between the two regions.

“Imagine a spring between your two hands, and you’re vibrating your hands back and forth,” said Desimone. “If you time it just right, your hands are going to have a spring bouncing back and forth at a certain resonance. The neural equivalent of that is a very strong signal in the brain.”

Neurons in the prefrontal cortex were essentially directing the neurons in the visual cortex to pay attention by firing with them, Desimone said. He believes this type of synchronization may be a mechanism for communication between separate brain regions.

“[The results] provide a possible explanation for how attention-dependent synchrony might be brought about by the [prefrontal cortex], and how the communication between distant neurons might be facilitated by attention,” said Tirin Moore, a neurobiologist at Stanford University who was not involved with the study. “This is an important step indeed.”

See Also:

Citation: “High-Frequency, Long-Range Coupling Between Prefrontal and Visual Cortex During Attention,” by G.G. Gregoriou, S.J. Gotts, H. Zhou, R. Desimone. Science Vol. 324, Issue 5930.

Image: Flickr/Quasic

Cameron's Avatar a 3D Drug Trip?

2009-05-01T18:57:00Z

bowman9991 writes "James Cameron's first movie since 'Titanic', his upcoming science fiction epic 'Avatar', has a budget pushing US$200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to Avatar's success or failure, may be habit forming. Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron's 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact."

A Single Neuron Can Change the Activity of the Whole Brain

2009-05-01T19:34:46Z

(PhysOrg.com) -- The pulsing of a single neuron can switch a brain`s waves from the equivalent of a big ocean swell to ripples on a pond, according to new research from Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Yang Dan of the University of California, Berkeley.

10 Questions For Michael J. Fox

2009-05-30T13:39:01Z

Michael J. Fox gets asked 10 questions mostly about how he dealt with Parkinson’s disease and how this affected his life and acting career.

The Bionics Woman: Yoky Matsuoka

2009-03-24T09:51:00Z

Where Humans and Robots Connect: the MacArthur "genius grant" fellow talks about her work developing a prosthetic robotic brain computer interface.

Brain and behaviour video curating from PsychCentral, the web's most trusted source of mental health site.

Neuroethics Diavlog

2009-05-15T01:30:00Z

Brains and Gavels: Science writer Carl Zimmer discusses neuroethics with cognitive science pioneer Michael Gazzaniga.

Brain and behaviour video curating at PsychCentral, the web's most trusted source of mental health info.

Beyond cochlear implants: awakening the deafened brain.

2009-05-29T05:33:52Z

Publication Date: 2009 May 26 PMID: 19471266
Authors: Moore, D. R. - Shannon, R. V.
Journal: Nat Neurosci

Cochlear implants have provided hearing to more than 120,000 deaf people. Recent surgical developments include direct electrical stimulation of the brain, bilateral implants and implantation in children less than 1 year old. However, research is beginning to refocus on the role of the brain in providing benefits to implant users. The auditory system is able to use the highly impoverished input provided by implants to interpret speech, but this only works well in those who have developed language before their deafness or in those who receive their implant at a very young age. We discuss recent evidence suggesting that developing the ability of the brain to learn how to use an implant may be as important as further improvements of the implant technology.

post to: CiteULike

All smoke and mirror neurons?

2009-05-27T08:00:00Z

New Scientist has a tantalising snippet reporting on a shortly to be released and potentially important new study challenging the idea of 'mirror neurons'.

Mirror neurons fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else doing it. The theory is that by simulating action even when watching an act, the neurons allow us to recognise and understand other people's actions and intentions...

However, Alfonso Caramazza at Harvard University and colleagues say their research suggests this theory is flawed.

Neurons that encounter repeated stimulus reduce their successive response, a process called adaptation. If mirror neurons existed in the activated part of the brain, reasoned Caramazza, adaptation should be triggered by both observation and performance.

To test the theory, his team asked 12 volunteers to watch videos of hand gestures and, when instructed, to mimic the action. However, fMRI scans of the participants' brains showed that the neurons only adapted when gestures were observed then enacted, but not the other way around.

Caramazza says the finding overturns the core theory of mirror neurons that activation is a precursor to recognition and understanding of an action. If after executing an act, "you need to activate the same neurons to recognise the act, then those neurons should have adapted," he says.

The study is to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and apparently is embargoed so the full text is not yet available, although it should appear here when it is.

The announcement is interesting because using adaptation is a novel way of testing 'mirror neurons' and the lead researcher, Alfonso Caramazza, is known for a long series of influential neuropsychology studies.

He has a reputation for being a sober and considered scientist so it will be interesting to see if the final study is really the challenge to mirror neurons as it seems.

Although the hype has subsided a little, the years following the initial reports saw these now famous neurons being used to explain everything from language, to empathy, to why we love art.

We're now in a period where we're taking, if you'll excuse the pun, a somewhat more reflective look at the topic and developing more nuanced theories about how this brain system functions.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments. Looks like this paper might have the potential to cause a ruckus. A comment from mirror neuron researcher Marco Iacoboni:

Caramazza’s paper is seriously flawed. The technique of fMRI adaptation seemed very promising ten years ago, but careful studies on its neurophysiological correlates have demonstrated that its findings are uninterpretable. Indeed, Caramazza’s manuscript has been around for many years and nobody wanted to publish it. Caramazza managed to publish with an old trick that only PNAS allows: he handed it personally to a friend of his. The paper is basically unrefereed (this is what it means ‘Edited by...’ under its title).

Link to NewSci on 'Role of mirror neurons may need a rethink'.

Free the Science

2009-05-12T05:58:00Z

30 Neuroscience journals Free access (untill May 30 2009) Thanks SPRINGER

The Psychology of Attention

2009-05-13T09:22:47Z

› How attention works, what happens when it fails and how it can be improved.

Every day we we are bombarded with perceptions, ideas and emotions and what we choose to pay attention to shapes our lives, it makes us who we are.

Attention is one of the most fascinating and highly researched areas in psychology. Psychologists have found that with training we can perform impressive feats of multitasking, we can divide our visual attention (without moving our eyes) and we are surprisingly effective at picking out just one voice from a multitude.

This series of posts looks at how attention works, how it fails and what we can do to improve it.

[Click the titles to read the full articles]

1. The Cocktail Party Effect
For psychologists the 'cocktail party effect' is our impressive and under-appreciated ability to tune our attention to just one voice from a multitude. It's a great example of just how selective our attention can be.

2. The Attentional Spotlight
Our attention moves around the visual field, often remarkably independent of our actual gaze direction. Psychologists have been forced to come up with ingenious methods for probing the abilities of our 'mind's eye'.

3. Learning to Multitask: Simultaneous Reading and Writing
Research that hints at our potential to carry out two sophisticated tasks which require conscious deliberation at the same time. Perhaps there really is no limit to our general cognitive capacity.

4. Can Visual Attention Truly Be Divided?
Measuring the electrical activity in the brain suggests people can successfully divide their attention between two different locations for several seconds.

5. 18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong
18 ways attention can go wrong, some very common, some extremely unusual, a few downright weird; each giving us an insight into how our minds work.

6. Attentional Blink and the Stream of Consciousness
We are caught in a world of metaphorical attentional blinks which, like literal eye-blinks, we usually don't notice because consciousness papers over the cracks. Consciousness is less of a smooth stream and more of a bumpy ride.

7. How Meditation Improves Attention
William James wrote that controlling attention is at "the very root of judgement, character and will". He also noted that controlling attention is much easier said than done.

→ If you enjoyed this series on attention, you might also enjoy: 7 sins of memory and the hidden workings of the mind.

[Image credit: royblumenthal]

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Can evolution explain how minds work?

2009-05-17T20:39:41Z

Publication Date: 2009 Apr 16 PMID: 19370014
Authors: Bolhuis, J. J. - Wynne, C. D.
Journal: Nature

post to: CiteULike

Brain imaging skewed.

2009-05-15T23:08:56Z

Publication Date: 2009 Apr 30 PMID: 19415822
Authors: Abbott, A.
Journal: Nature

post to: CiteULike

Open-access publishing can survive recession.

2009-05-14T19:10:28Z

Publication Date: 2009 Apr 23 PMID: 19396122
Authors: Aerts, R.
Journal: Nature

post to: CiteULike

Neuroscience: Optical control of reward.

2009-05-14T19:09:35Z

Publication Date: 2009 Apr 23 PMID: 19396134
Authors: Moorman, D. E. - Aston-Jones, G.
Journal: Nature

post to: CiteULike