Bwaiiinz! Yes Igor Let's Transplant Brains....

Ok, blame it on the season.  All levity aside, there has been some startling strides (really - no pun intended) being made in the field of brain tissue transplant.

Darek Fidyka was stabbed in the back four years ago,  paralyzing him from the chest down.

Now we hear of a stunning success after experimental treatments that Fidyka has regained some feeling in his lower body and is learning to walk again.  According to the Popular Science article, the treatment involved removing part of Fidyka's brain and then injecting those cells into the damaged area of his spinal cord.  

The tissue removed were olfactory bulbs (this is the part of the brain that allow you to smell) growing cells from the bulb and eventually injecting them.   Curiously the reason this brain tissue was used is because the nerves in the olfactory system are the only part of the human nervous system known to regrow after being damaged.  (Fidyka reported no ill effects from the removal)

Read full article HERE

Almost Sounds Like a Zombie Wedding!

There is an old tradition that not to many engaged couples practice just before marriage. 

It used to be highly popular for the bride and groom to be, to exchange small trinkets or gifts, now for the most part, these "gifts" take the form of wedding rings.  

I read an article where one groom took this tradition to a higher level.  As Michael Mack said recently on his blog:  "I wanted a special gift for my wife on our wedding day," 

It seems both of the soon to be newly weds  are neuro-scientists  at the University of Texas at Austin, studying human memory.

Michael had a 3D printing company,  print a  model of his brain using a scan he had done earlier.  He then put it in a jar, wrapped it up and sent it to her. 

Her maid of honor said that when his wife to be received the gift she exclaimed "Is this his brain? OMG!  Michael reported on his blog that she love the gift.

Read the complete c/net article HERE

Researchers Working on a Brain Prosthesis

Remember the story I read a few years back about a man who is stabbed in the head and suffers massive brain damage?  The flip on that story was there was a prosthesis that by passed and augmented the damage to his brain and allowed him to think and function.  

Well that was good science fiction, but Philadelphia researchers are working on a project that may help restore memory to brain damaged patients.  

Up to this point devices could only activate one or two electrodes.  What the the research groups are working towards is a controller that will activate hundreds of electrodes!  Plus how the electrodes fire is controlled by the patient's brain.

There are teams not only working on memory loss but also on Parkinson's.  One team is working with a device manufacturer to develop a unit, within the next 3 years, capable of targeting 256 sites in the brain.   The ultimate goal is a permanent and implantable device. 

Read the rest of the Newsworks article HERE

Two Brains Linked Electronically Through Cables

Scientists from the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, building  on their previous work with brain-machine interfaces have connected the brains of lab rats, allowing one to communicate directly to another via cables.

The  implants allowed  signals to be sent from one rat to another, creating the first ever brain-to-brain interface.  The devices allowed sensory and motor signals to be sent across the interface, even if the interface nodes were thousands of miles apart. 

The interfaces do not have to be connected to another brain, but can also be connected to a variety of sensor.  The team interfaced on rat with infra-red detectors, allowing the animal to "touch" infra-red energy directly. 

Although the signals were in real time, results did not occur instantly.  Training for 1 hour a day for 45   days eventually brought a success rate of close to 70%.

For more information you can read the BBC News Article here

or the Scientific Reports article here

Original Boing Boing article

Robots of the Mind Getting Closer

The age old convention of a mechanical or biological machine that is controlled by the operator's mind had been around forever.  Movies as recent as say Avatar is just such an example.

Now according to the IO9 blog report that researchers from France and Japan have taken steps to make this technology a reality.  Roboticists at the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory and the CNRS-LIRMM Interactive Digital Human group have made huge strides in the development of an interface that would allow a human to activate the machine with only a thought.


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Read more at Diginfo

Does the Voice in Your Head Sound Like You?

I know...I am really just ASKING for the jokes arn't I? But when you come to consider it - just exactly what does the voice in your head sound like and does it speak and pronounce words as well as you do when you speak out loud or read out loud? It is almost like a Philip K. Dick story writing itself huh?

Anyway, I came across this piece of strangeness in Boing Boing. It cites a study published last fall by psychology researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham. It really is an interesting question.

From the article

• Although you might think it's a given, previous studies have suggested that the voice you speak with and the voice you think with might not be pronouncing words quite the same.

The surprising or not so much result from the new study is that there is some parity between between audible and silent pronunciation.  Pretty much opposite what convention up to that point would have us believe.

Article writer Stan Carey goes into great detail on how the study was performed and as counter intuitive as it might seem, it IS an interesting read.  Click the article title to go to his Boing Boing article.

Stem Cells to Brain Cells?!

Lets talk about weird cloning in the Dolly world....
Hell that didn't even make sense to me! So lets se if I can unravel it a bit.

Scientists at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine were able to make brain cells using stem cells from people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses. Why? To study the neurons and specifically to look at standard psychological medicines, such as lithium, to see how they affect these cells in the laboratory.

It seems that many of the drugs used to treat mental illness are well documented as to their effication but little is truly known as to how the drugs actually affects the brain cells of the patient.

The article goes on to say

• Scientists also hope to work on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and motor neuron disease.

New Brain Implant Tech for Detecting & Treating Seizures - Terminal Man anyone?

Science Daily blog has an interesting article concerning new technology that "detect(s) a number of neurological symptoms, such as .... epileptic seizure(s), and treating them simultaneously. Now I know this is not exactly ground breaking because some form of this tech has been talked about since the 90s at the very least and very similar tech is used for and in the case of extreme heart disease to shock a fibrillating heart back to sinusoidal rhythm and there has been discussion of a form of EST in severe depression. This tech is aiming at a different procedure by "loading specific drugs onto an array of electrodes and triggering their release into ... neurons"

What really differentiates this technology from past ones, other than using chemicals instead of electro-shock, comes from the article also.

• On top of this, the researchers have also demonstrated how the release of drugs could be informed, in real-time, by the recording of activity in neurons, a step essential for creating a closed-loop system that both diagnoses and treats symptoms simultaneously

Its a fascinating idea but it did call to mind Crichton's Terminal Man. You can read the complete Science Daily article here

Reasons why you will never store you "mind" online

Dvice blog has postulated that a person's mind will never be "living" online or digitally. There are some good arguments made...I am sure some counters are available as well? So here goes

Even the most reliable service crashes at the most inopportune moment. Without constant "backup" you would be in trouble in short order.

Digital storage media wears out alarmingly fast. Forget thinking.... constant backups, refreshes, and format updates, would be the rule of the day.

Power consumption. Your brain works on 25 watts. As the article states, Google takes 100 megawatts just to do a simple index, imagine what it would take just to power up the processing power of the human brain let alone enough power to let it think?!

Processing power. The brain in theory can do about 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops. IBM's Blue Gene/P supercomputer has a maximum theoretical limit of around 3 petaflops. But you say...well get three and you have enough...well not really, neuro-scientists now are certain that a neuron does more than just flip on and off to store data, but may in fact process and encode the data which in my mind ups the anti in a BIG way.

People forget that the brain is a management system for the body as well. The nervous system collects data and feeds the brain constant amounts of high bandwidth data every fraction of a second of the day. Without this constant stream of data, the mind soon stops functioning in any useful way. So now we are up to huge data loads, massive processing and unbelievable amounts of power.....

So it soon becomes evident that with all of this infrastructure will not be available, even if it worked, to everyone...wana guess who goes and who doesn't?

soooooooo lets say that all the problems are solved and everyone goes over...who does maintenance? Robots? ok, so who maintains them? and so on .......and we are counting on it all working perfectly forever?

The article really goes a lot more into depth. Read more here over at Dvice

New Research suggests your brain never forgets

From Wired Science comes this article describing an action by the brain that is poorly understood. Why does the brain"forget" and what happens to "forgotten memories"?

Well, according to neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine - in a study he co-authored, which was published in the magazine Neuron - forgotten memories may be hidden from your conscious mind, however, they might not be "gone".

• "Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” says Johnson.

That a memory stimulates neurological patterns encoded when the memory was formed, is a well understood science. Less, however, is known about what happens to these patterns when memory fades.

• It’s not known whether those details vanish from the mind altogether, or are subsumed by some larger pattern, or remain intact but inaccessible.

Johnson says that it is still unclear what happens to memory patterns.

• “But even when people claim that there are no details attached to their memories, we could still pick some of those details out.”

read the rest of the Wired article that describes the experiment on retrieving forgotten memories

Researchers believe human brain replication in 10 years

From ScienceDaily: Neuroscientists from the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland say that a model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible within ten years.

Professor Henry Markram claims that the complexity of the human mind is not a barrier to building a model. The brain contains trillions of synapses and billions of neurons, but it is still a finite number. Given the sophistication of today's technology, it is now possible to conceive of "reverse engineering" the brain.

The problem today is that no one even knows what we already understand about the brain.

• For Professor Markram, the most exciting part of his research is putting together the hundreds of thousands of small pieces of data that his lab has collected over the past 15 years, and seeing what a microcircuit of the brain looks like.

Robot controlled by living brain......

Yep, I said a living brain controlling a robot. Get ready, this is b movie creepie! lol




complete article here

Brain Music - the Composer & the Composed

Writes the publicist for the American Department of HomeLand Security:

"Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When that soundtrack is recorded and played back -- to an emergency responder, or a firefighter -- it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward." 

Robert Burns of DHS' s Science & Technology Directorate is evaluating neurotraining or "Brain Music", using music created in advance from listeners' own brain waves. The concept is to use the frequency, amplitude, and duration of musical sounds to move the brain from an anxious state to a more relaxed state (or vice versa, though Burns is not too keen to write about THAT).  Here is a sample brain music track from DHS   said by them to trigger an 'alert' feeling.

While Emergency responders and firefighters may benefit by, or at least be obligated to take part in, this sort of brain muzakery, why would it stop there?   Prisons may become oases of tranquility, if each inmate has his own personal pacifying music playing at appropriate times.

How long before arrestees must give a 'brainprint" as well as a fingerprint? You may have the right to remain silent, but your brainwaves won't.

Positronic - no Nanocarbon - possible

Science Daily has a great article concerning which direction scientists are taking to creating synthetic cortex. USC electrical engineering professor Alice Parker is doing research on Nanocarbon modeling, which may be the next step toward emulating human brain function. studying the behavior of cortical neurons - but, as Parker puts it, with approximately 100 billion neurons in the human cortex and approximately 60 trillion synaptic connections, the brain is massively interconnected, making the task of unraveling a neuron’s electrical circuitry quite complicated. With conventional electronics, the shear size of the build makes it infeasible and the cost of powering such a construct would be prohibitive, nanocarbon addresses both problems.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to answer one question: Will science ever be able to construct an artificial brain of reasonable size and cost that exhibits almost real-time behavior?

<- science daily article ->

Researchers now able to copy images in your brain to a computer

Viewing the brain while it does it's "thing" has become a fairly well understood science today. So much so that doctors and their ilk are able to "see" metal illness and disease. But "seeing" what the brain sees or imagines is a bit of a misnomer. Or has been up to this point. It would appear now that Japanese scientists have a device that can quite literally take images out of your brain and recreate them on a computer screen.

From IO9:

• Using an fMRI brain scanner, researchers read electrical signals coming from people's brains while they thought about letters in the word "neuron." The research team led by Yukiyaso Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs has designed software that can process the output of the fMRI and search for signals associated with vision.

A strange twist on this process is that the team is not only able to extract images of what a subject has or is looking at, but images of the test items when the subject is not viewing them. This opens the door to viewing imaginary images or "dreams" at some point in the future.

<- Neuron via IO9 ->
<- Pink Tentacle article ->

Robot with a Biological brain

Ready for this? This isn't spooky science done at a distance, it's in your face research. I was going through Suicide Bots blog and came upon this piece of strangeness:

• New Scientist reports that the University of Reading has made a robot using neuron’s from a rat brain.

Oh yes me hearties, here is an in depth discussion of growing rat neurons, installing them on an electrode grid, connecting said grid to a robot's control and decision making center and turning it on. Want more? How bout a film of the damn thing bumping it's way around a room? Yep, check out the video. The talk is good, the ideals, laudable.....but in the end, you have a sliver of live brain inside a robot that perambulates at will.... It's fascinating and repelling at the same time.

<- suicidebots.com ->

Selectively turn off parts of your Brain

Here is an errie and a bit scary demonstration using strong magnetic fields to selectively disable areas of the brain. They call it therapeutic I can see a somewhat darker use.

Researchers say we can all see into the future

From Sci-fi's Dvice blog comes an interesting notion that is bound to send you screaming if you think about it too hard. Consider this:

It takes a tenth of a second for visual information to get from your eyes to your brain, so everyone has the ability to predict what’s going to happen a tenth of a second into the future. That’s what you’re actually seeing, is that prediction. If you weren’t, everything would look like it was recorded a tenth of a second ago.

So we litterally have to predict what is going to happen 10 seconds into the future and make ourselves believe that what we are really doing is seeing everything in real time. The really interesting thing here that Dvice points out is that:

This explains how lots of magic tricks are done. In his research paper, Mark Changizi mentioned 50 types of visual illusions that work because your brain is attempting to predict what will happen 1/10th of a second into the future.

click article title for Dvice article or here for the complete Impact Lab's story

You are living 10 seconds in the past!

According to discussion amongst Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany which was reported in Nature Neuroscience : There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. Scientist found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

This quite literally means that the time it takes for sensory input to travel along nerves and get processed by the brain means we're always "living in the past". The folks at IO9 quip that to make brain / computer interfaces more efficient that we might one day opt to disgard the plodding "consciousness" part of our brains.

{Nature Neurosciewnce via IO9}

The Human Brain as a time machine

TIME online has a neat article discussing how the human brain is unique in the animal kingdom for the way it conceives time:

The human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year's Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time travelers.

TIME traveling Brain