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POPSBrain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory Nothing is going to have a greater impact on the fabric of society and our understanding of human identity more than a reliable tool of editing, erasing and amplifying memories. If not the first, this is one of the holy grails of brain research nd technology. The ethical and other philosophical implications are profound.
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POPSMemory Switch Could Enable Brain Hacks Won't be bad to get hold of some of our brain master switches. A memory activation switch, a switch for forgetting certain memories, a switch to make negative emotions go away , a light switch for insight and creative feats and from there the sky is the limit...
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POPSI Feel Your Pain: Neural Mechanisms Of Empathy
CIP patients showed decreased fMRI activation of visual regions, a result indicative of their reduced emotional arousal to the view of others' pain. On the other hand, in the CIP patients but not the controls, the capacity for empathy strongly predicted activation of key midline brain structures involved in processes linked to inferring the emotional states of others. These results suggest that in the absence of functional resonance mechanisms shaped by personal pain experiences, CIP patients might rely crucially on their empathetic abilities to imagine the pain of others, with activation of midline brain structures being the neural signature of this cognitive-emotional process. "Our findings underline the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and in the ability to understand someone else's feelings despite the lack of any previous personal experience of it—an empathetic challenge frequently raised during human social interactions," concludes Dr. Danzig
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POPSNew games powered by brain waves In a report this week USA Today newspaper said game maker Uncle Milton plans to release a similar game this year. Called "Force Trainer" it is named after "The Force" powers of Yoda and Luke Skywalker in the popular Star Wars films. The game calls for players to lift a ball inside a transparent tube using their powers of concentration. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," the daily quoted Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, as saying. "Force Trainer" also uses electroencephalography, or EEG, to measure electrical activity in the brain recorded on a headset containing sensors.
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POPSPharmaceutical Love Potion: Not Yet... In humans, brain regions associated with dopamine are activated in mothers looking at pictures of their children, and lovers at each other — and, perhaps instructively, in drug addicts taking heroin or cocaine. To Young, all this means that science may soon treat lovelessness as easily as it now treats depression and anxiety. "Drugs that manipulate brain systems at whim to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far away," he writes. Not so fast, said Fisher. The alterations required to manipulate love, she said, are likely so complex and far-reaching as to be unattainable in a pill. "There are cognitive processes and limbic reactions associated with basic emotions," said Fisher. "And you can change brain chemistry, but you're still not going to change memories and experiences in a human being."
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POPSSongs From The Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words Dr. Horace Dobbs, a leading authority on dolphin-assisted therapy, has joined the team as consultant. "I have long held the belief that the dolphin brain, comparable in size with our own, has specialized in processing auditory data in much the same way that the human brain has specialized in processing visual data. Nature tends not to evolve brain mass without a need, so we must ask ourselves what dolphins do with all that brain capacity. The answer appears to lie in the development of brain systems that require huge auditory processing power. There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. We an therefore hypothesize that the dolphin's primary method of communication is picture based. Thus, the picture-based imaging method, employed by Reid and Kassewitz, seems entirely plausible."
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POPSDistorted Body Images: A Quick and Easy Way to Reduce Pain For the study, Lorimer Moseley of Oxford University and his colleagues recruited 10 participants, all of whom suffer from chronic pain in their right arm. The participants were asked to perform a set of movements with their right arm, under different conditions. In one condition, they observed their limb through a pair of binoculars, which magnified their hand to twice its normal size; in another, the binoculars were inverted so that their hands appeared smaller than they actually were. As they performed the arm movements, the participants were asked to rate the amount of pain they experienced. Each one reported that the pain they felt became markedly worse when they moved their limb. Surprisingly though, every participant also reported that the extent to which their pain increased depended on how their vision had been manipulated. They reported the greatest increase in pain when they saw a magnified view of their hand, and the smallest increase when their hands were minified.
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POPSNew Discovery Could Rejuvenate the Brain “If we can target therapies that block this mechanism, then neurons should be able to sprout new connections, therefore stimulating the brain’s ability to repair its wiring network.” The research reveals that the loss of plasticity is due to the protein calpain actively blocking the protein cortactin, which is responsible for the sprouting of new connections. The researchers reduced calpain activity in animal models to unlock the sprouting potential of neurons and found that when calpain activity is reduced neural plasticity is enhanced.
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POPSGoogle's Secret Weapon: MapReduce As the inventors of MapReduce noted in a recent paper, "It has been used across a wide range of domains within Google including: large-scale machine learning problems; clustering problems...; extracting data to produce reports of popular queries; extracting properties of Web pages for new experiments and products...; processing of satellite imagery data; language model processing for statistical machine translation, and; large-scale graph computation." Or in other words, the tasks Google performs are similar to the functions performed by the brain: learning, categorization, vision and language.
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POPSFirst 'placebo gene' discovered To see if there were genetic differences between responders and non-responders, Furmark screened them for a variant of the gene for tryptophan hydroxylase-2, which makes the brain chemical, serotonin. Previous studies suggested that people with two copies of a particular "G" variant are less anxious in standard "fear" tests. Sure enough 8 of the 10 responders had two copies, while none of the non-responders did (Journal of Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2534-08.2008). Furmark believes the effect of the gene may extend to other conditions where the amygdala is involved, such as phobias, pain disorders and even depression. However, he cautions that only further studies will reveal whether the gene influences the placebo effect more generally. Echoing Furmark's caution is Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, Italy. "We know that there's not a single placebo effect but many." Some may work through genetics, he adds, others through the expectation of a reward.
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POPSDeep brain stimulation induces vivid memories In addition, this incident reaffirms a suspicion I’ve had about the brain and its ability to store memories. I’ve often thought that the brain does an excellent job recording and storing memories, but that our recall mechanisms are disturbingly weak and highly selective. Our long-term associations with memories are frequently diminished (e.g. some of our more painful memories are often exaggerated, distorted or suppressed). What this incident with DBS suggests is that our memories are beautifully preserved in our brains. We just lack the recall linkages and cognitive mechanisms to bring those memories back in any kind of detail. Our memories are accessed as fleeting bits of information instead of linear experiences.
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POPSIBM plans 'brain-like' computers The fundamental shift toward putting the problem-solving before the problem makes the potential applications for such devices practically limitless. Free from the constraints of explicitly programmed function, computers could gather together disparate information, weigh it based on experience, form memory independently and arguably begin to solve problems in a way that has so far been the preserve of what we call "thinking".
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POPSForgotten But Not Gone: How The Brain Re-learns "What surprised us most, however, was that the majority of the appendages which developed in response to the information blockade, continued to exist, despite the fact that the blockade was abolished ", project leader Mark Hübener explains. Everything seems to point to the fact that synapses are only disabled, but not physically removed. "Since an experience that has been made may occur again at a later point in time, the brain apparently opts to save a few appendages for a rainy day"
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POPSSharism: A Mind Revolution However, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative productivity, if only because they've switched off their sharing paths. People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative choice, her choice will be, "Share."
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POPSAnatomy of a false memory A new study now reconciles these conflicting data, by showing that the different regions of the brain previously implicated are involved in different kinds of memory errors. It also pinpoints a specific region as being involved in false memories, and could help researchers better understand how the brain controls memory.
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POPSSocial Interactions Can Alter Gene Expression In Brain, And Vice Versa A critical insight came in 1992, in a study of songbirds led by David Clayton. He and his colleagues found that expression of a specific gene increases in the forebrain of a zebra finch or canary just after it hears a new song from a male of the same species. This gene, egr1, codes for a protein that itself regulates the expression of other genes.
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POPSAttention and Emotional Self Regulation 1) Alerting: helps us maintain an Alert State. 2) Orienting: focuses our senses on the information we want. For example, you are now listening to my voice. 3) Executive Attention: regulates a variety of networks, such as emotional responses and sensory information. This is critical for most other skills, and clearly correlated with academic performance. It is distributed in frontal lobes and the cingulate gyrus. The development of executive attention can be easily observed both by questionnaire and cognitive tasks after about age 3–4, when parents can identify the ability of their children to regulate their emotions and control their behavior in accord with social demands. Very interesting read.
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POPSNeuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience. In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. As Mark Twain said, "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. Interesting read
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POPSAn End to Paralysis with Artificial Brain-to-Muscle Connectors Say the researchers: Until now, brain-computer interfaces were designed to decode the activity of neurons known to be associated with movement of specific body parts. Here, the researchers discovered that any motor cortex cell, regardless of whether it had been previously associated with wrist movement, was capable of stimulating muscle activity. This finding greatly expands the potential number of neurons that could control signals for brain-computer interfaces and also illustrates the flexibility of the motor cortex. Human implementations for the technology are at least a decade away, but this discovery could be a game-changer for dealing with paralysis. One possibility would be to connect the motor cortex with an area of the spine below an injury. Signals would be re-routed around the damaged spinal cord, and could allow the brain to regain control of the paralyzed body parts affected by the injury.
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POPSOlfactory Neurons Use Sophisticated Fuzzy Coding They concluded that the peripheral code combines precise coding with fuzzy, stochastic responses in which neurons show apparent unpredictability in their responses to a given odour. They now believe that fuzzy coding occurs in other organisms, is translated into differing degrees of activation in the brain, and forms a key component of odour recognition in the first stages of olfactory processing. Dr McCrohan explains: “The nose gives us insight into the brain - it’s not a computer, it’s not precise, it’s fuzzy. This may be a consequence of way the receptors are built and must be used in some way as part of the process by which the brain perceives an almost infinite variety of odours.
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POPSBrain surgery with a banjo In this case, the surgeons used the banjo to fine tune the treatment. Because of his tremors, Adcock no longer had the dexterity required for his characteristic fast picking style. He played the instrument during his operation so that the surgeons could pinpoint exactly where the electrodes would most effective.
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