Neuroscience

"Cellist Katinka Kleijn performed both halves of a duet Sunday night. Her hands played the cello, and her brain, hooked up to a headset that detects cerebral electrical signals, played itself. (...) "Intelligence in the Human Machine,” the cello/brain duet, explored the relationship a performer has to the music she’s playing. During the performance, at Chicago’s Cultural Center, Kleijn wore an Emotiv EPOC, a neuroheadset with 14 sensors that attach to the scalp and detect brainwaves. In front of her, a laptop flashed a word and a few measures of music. She then played the music on her cello, interpreting the word onscreen. At the same time, her brainwaves, translated to audio, changed sounds as she reacted to the word. (...) “Not only is Katinka playing the cello, but she is also, in a sense, playing her brain waves, emphasizing what’s going on in her brain while she’s performing,” Dehaan says." - Amira

"The science of self-improvement never ceases. Every year brings dozens of new quirky findings about how to be more effective, whether in managing our time, being more creative or just getting things done. Here are some of the highlights for me from 2012." - Lit from Bookmarklet

"1. You don’t know yourself as well as you think. We think we know ourselves best, but more and more evidence is surfacing to the contrary. This raises an interesting challenge for employers who solely base their hiring decisions on self-reported questionnaires. Psychologist Timothy Wilson proposes that to really know someone, you have to ask others to evaluate you. It turns out that... more... - Lit

"3. We’re more creative when thinking about others. Creativity in the business world is increasingly important. Creativity often involves viewing things from different perspectives. New findings show that we are more creative when we think of others solving problems instead of ourselves. To test this, professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich presented 137 undergraduates with this riddle:... more... - Lit

"Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who began her seminal research on cell development while dodging bombs and fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II, died Dec. 30 at her home in Rome. She was 103. ...Dr. Levi-Montalcini was widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of her generation, and her accomplishments were particularly notable because of the handicaps and obstacles faced in science by women throughout the world when she began her career.Her rise to the highest reaches of scientific achievement was made even more difficult because she embarked on her career under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who expelled her and her fellow Jews from the Italian academic world. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a substance known as the nerve growth factor, a naturally occurring protein that helps spark the growth of nerve cells. She launched that groundbreaking research in a makeshift bedroom laboratory during... more... - Lit

"In essence, Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s discovery helped explain how embryonic nerve cells grow into a fully developed nervous system and, more broadly, how a damaged nervous system might be repaired. Cohen was credited with the identification of the epidermal growth factor, a similar substance that helps regulate the growth of skin and other cells. Together, those advances “opened new... more... - Lit

"Experiencing and expressing gratitude is an important part of any spiritual practice. It opens the heart and activates positive emotion centers in the brain. Regular practice of gratitude can change the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. The positive emotions we evoke can soothe distress and broaden our thinking patterns so we develop a larger and more expansive view of our lives. Gratitude is an emotion of connectedness, which reminds us we are part of a larger universe with all living things. Below are some of my favorite quotes about gratitude to help inspire you and deepen your thinking about finding an enduring place for gratitude in your own life." - Lit from Bookmarklet

"Gratitude Quotes "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." - Marcel Proust "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. John... more... - Lit

"How to Bring Gratitude into Your Life To begin bringing gratitude into your life, you can deliberately meditate on all the things in your own life that help you or give you pleasure. You can also write a gratitude diary, posting pictures and writing about the things you feel grateful for each day. The holidays are a great time to express your gratitude to friends and family by writing... more... - Lit

"Spatial location is closely connected to the formation of new memories. Until now, grid cells were thought to be part of a single unified map system. New findings from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology demonstrate that the grid system is in fact composed of a number of independent grid maps, each with unique properties. Each map displays a particular resolution (mesh size), and responds independently to changes in the environment. A system of several distinct grid maps can support a large number of unique combinatorial codes used to associate new memories formed with specific spatial information. (...) Your brain has at least four different senses of location – and perhaps as many as 10. And each is different. (...) This independence can be used by the brain to create new combinations - many combinations - which is a very useful tool for memory formation. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

:-) - Amira

One of the challenges of understanding the complex behavior of animals is to relate the behavior to the complex processes occurring within the brain. So far, neural models have not been able to bridge this gap, but a new software model, Spaun, goes some way to addressing this problem. - lotek93

на элементах развернутую статью выложили: http://elementy.ru/news... - bifurcafe

"Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 1010 neurons (10 billion) and 1014 synapses (100 trillion, based on estimates of the number of synapses in the human brain) to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” IBM says it has now accomplished this milestone with its new “TrueNorth” system running on the world’s fastest operating supercomputer, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LBNL) Blue Gene/Q Sequoia, using 96 racks (1,572,864 processor cores, 1.5 PB memory, 98,304 MPI processes, and 6,291,456 threads). (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Computation (‘neurons’), memory (‘synapses’), and communication (‘axons,’ ‘dendrites’) are mathematically abstracted away from biological detail toward engineering goals of maximizing function (utility, applications) and minimizing cost (power, area, delay) and design complexity of hardware implementation.” (...) “This fulfills a core vision of the DARPA SyNAPSE project to bring... more... - Amira

See also: CogniMem demonstrates 40,000-neuron, scalable cognitive memory computing system at SC12 Conference http://www.embedded.com/electro... - Amira

"Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks is a 10-minute film and an accompanying TED Book. Based on new research on how to best nurture children’s brains from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and University of Washington’s I-LABS, the film explores the parallels between a child’s brain development and the development of the global brain of Internet, offering insights into the best ways to shape both. The film and TEDBook launched at the California Academy of Sciences on November 8, 2012." http://bit.ly/QCcAnn - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Since the days of the ancient Greeks, scientists have wondered why the ear prefers harmony. Now, scientists suggest that the reason may go deeper than an aversion to the way clashing notes abrade auditory nerves; instead, it may lie in the very structure of the ear and brain, which are designed to respond to the elegantly spaced structure of a harmonious sound. (...) If the chord is harmonic, or “consonant,” the notes are spaced neatly enough so that the individual fibers of the auditory nerve carry specific frequencies to the brain. By perceiving both the parts and the harmonious whole, the brain responds to what scientists call harmonicity. (...)" - Amira

“Beating is the textbook explanation for why people don’t like dissonance, so our study is the first real evidence that goes against this assumption” (...)“It suggests that consonance rests on the perception of harmonicity, and that, when questioning the innate nature of these preferences, one should study harmonicity and not beating.” (...) “Sensitivity to harmonicity is important in... more... - Amira

See also: Listen: The Music of a Human Brain http://www.wired.com/wiredsc... - Amira

"It turns out that the pathways in your brain — the connections between neurons — are almost perfectly grid-like. It’s rather weird: If you’ve ever seen a computer ribbon cable — a flat, 2D ribbon of wires stuck together, such as an IDE hard drive cable — the brain is basically just a huge collection of these ribbons, traveling parallel or perpendicular to each other. There are almost zero diagonals, nor single neurons that stray from the neuronal highways. The human brain is just one big grid of neurons — a lot like the streets of Manhattan, minus Broadway, and then projected into three dimensions. (...) “Before, we had just driving directions. Now, we have a map showing how all the highways and byways are interconnected,” says Van Wedeen, a member of the Human Connectome Project." - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Brain wiring is not like the wiring in your basement, where it just needs to connect the right endpoints. Rather, the grid is the language of the brain and wiring and re-wiring work by modifying it.” Curiously, it seems like this network of highways and byways is laid out when we’re still an early fetus. At a very early stage, our brains form three “primal pathways” that traverse our... more... - Amira

"Research has shown that the brain is constantly making predictions about future events. Theories of prediction in perception, action and learning suggest that the brain serves to reduce the discrepancies between expectation and actual experience, i.e., by reducing the prediction error. Forward models of action and perception propose the generation of a predictive internal representation of the expected sensory outcome, which is matched to the actual sensory feedback. Shared neural representations have been found when experiencing one's own and observing other's actions, rewards, errors, and emotions such as fear and pain. These general principles of the “predictive brain” are well established and have already begun to be applied to social aspects of cognition. The application and relevance of these predictive principles to social cognition are discussed in this article. Evidence is presented to argue that simple non-social cognitive processes can be extended to explain complex cognitive processes required for social interaction, with common neural activity seen for both social and non-social cognitions." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"A number of studies are included which demonstrate that bottom-up sensory input and top-down expectancies can be modulated by social information. The concept of competing social forward models and a partially distinct category of social prediction errors are introduced. The evolutionary implications of a “social predictive brain” are also mentioned, along with the implications on... more... - Amira

- Una bellissima review del lavoro di Roy F. Baumeister (psicologo sociale) sull'autocontrollo e la forza di volontà. - viltrio from Bookmarklet

“Morality is not the product of a mythical pure reason divorced from natural selection and the neural wiring that motivates the animal to sociability. It emerges from the human brain and its responses to real human needs, desires, and social experience; it depends on innate emotional responses, on reward circuitry that allows pleasure and fear to be associated with certain conditions, on cortical networks, hormones and neuropeptides. Its cognitive underpinnings owe more to case-based reasoning than to conformity to rules. (...) Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be “neurophilosophy.” There’s no other way. (...) Morality turns out to be not a quest for overarching principles but rather a process and practice not very different from negotiating our way through day-to-day social life. Brain scans, she points out, show little to no difference between how the brain works when solving social problems and how it works when solving ethical dilemmas. (…)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

how far to should neurochemistry be taken? cf. Churchland's favorite oxytocin driving emotions -- but surely logic is not exempt from neurochemical influences :-) So the question becomes: which moral imperatives are not biologically driven, and why would they be sustained in society? cf. Churchland v. Haidt. - Adriano

"Researchers have begun to show that it is possible to use brain recordings to reconstruct aspects of an image or movie clip someone is viewing, a sound someone is hearing or even the text someone is reading. A new study by University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University scientists brings this work one step closer to actual mind reading by using brain recordings to infer the way people organize associations between words in their memories. (...) About a second before the participants recalled each word, these same “meaning signals” that were identified during the study phase were spontaneously reactivated in the participants’ brains. Because the participants were not seeing, hearing or speaking any words at the times these patterns were reactivated, the researchers could be sure they were observing the neural signatures of the participants’ self-generated, internal thoughts. (...) Since the participants were instructed to say the words in the order they came to mind, the... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The techniques the researchers developed in this study could also be adapted to analyze many different ways of mentally organizing studied information. “In addition to looking at memories organized by time, as in our previous study, or by meaning, as in our current study, one could use our technique to identify neural signatures of how individuals organize learned information according... more... - Amira

"Neurons come in an astounding assortment of shapes and sizes, forming a thick inter-connected jungle of cells. Now, UCL neuroscientists have found that there is a simple pattern that describes the tree-like shape of all neurons. Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action. Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity. Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"New work by UCL neuroscientists, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program which connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes which are indistinguishable from real neurons – and also happen to be very... more... - Amira

"A 2/3 power law: L = (3/4π)1/3 × V1/3n2/3 where n is the number of dendritic sections to make up the tree, L is the total length of these sections, and V is the total volume" http://www.kurzweilai.net/simple-... "A scaling law derived from optimal dendritic wiring" by H. Cuntz, A. Manthy, M. Hausser: http://www.pnas.org/content... - Amira

"Johns Hopkins scientists have engineered cells that behave like AND and OR Boolean logic gates, producing an output based on one or more unique inputs. This feat, published in the May issue of Nature Chemical Biology, could eventually help researchers create computers that use cells as tiny circuits. (...) Many researchers are striving to mimic devices in everyday use by engineering new qualities into biological materials, including biomolecules and cells. Several of those engaged in this relatively new field, known as synthetic biology, have tried to create biological computers. At the heart of both the biological and the more everyday silicon-based variety of computers are Boolean logic gates, which produce responses that vary depending on what type and how many inputs they receive. For example, AND gates need two unique inputs to generate an output. In contrast, OR gates generate an output based on whether they receive one input, or another, or both. (...) "People like to have... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. (...) Science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin. (…) As expected, it took students much longer to assess the veracity of true scientific statements that cut against our instincts. (...) We never fully unlearn our mistaken intuitions about the world. We just learn to ignore them." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Shtulman and colleagues summarize their findings: "When students learn scientific theories that conflict with earlier, naïve theories, what happens to the earlier theories? Our findings suggest that naïve theories are suppressed by scientific theories but not supplanted by them." (...) According to Dunbar, the reason the physics majors had to recruit the D.L.P.F.C. is because they were... more... - Amira

See also: Why people believe in strange things http://ff.im/EQlZn and Shtulman's study http://ff.im/Yo2Jo - Amira

"Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that networks of brain areas “tick together” in participants who are viewing similar emotional events in a movie. Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they watched movies depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant emotions. After scanning, participants watched the movies again and continuously rated their experience of pleasantness–unpleasantness (i.e., valence) and of arousal–calmness. (...) During movie viewing, participants' brain activity was synchronized in lower- and higher-order sensory areas and in corticolimbic emotion circuits. Negative valence was associated with increased ISC in the emotion-processing network (thalamus, ventral striatum, insula) and in the default-mode network (precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus). High arousal was associated with increased ISC in the... more... - Amira

"John Locke, the philosopher, who also argued that personal identity was really dependent on the autobiographical or episodic memories, and you are the sum of your memories, which, of course, is something that fractionates and fragments in various forms of dementia. (...) As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us. That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable... more... - Amira

"Noë begins with a sharp critique of scientists such as DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick, who insist that nothing but neurons determines our daily perceptions and sense of self. He then examines studies of human and animal behavior that demonstrate an inextricable link between identity and environment. Nöe regrettably limits his treatise by ignoring considerable research from transpersonal psychology suggesting that consciousness transcends physicality altogether. His book is still an invaluable contribution to cognitive science and philosophy." \\ Recap: neuroscience as molecular and cell biology must also encompass ecological biology. One's skin is not the outer marker of consciousness. See also http://ff.im/ExcRH - Adriano from Bookmarklet

earlier form of the book appeared in Perceptual Experience as "Experience without the head" (2004 draft): http://docs.google.com/viewer... Noë mentions his teacher: Susan Hurley -- she wrote the book _Consciousness in Action_ in 1998. Some of Noë's examples using the perceptual understanding of art are really interesting... turns out his previous book is Action in Perception (2004, MIT Press). - Adriano

"Lichtman's machine is an automated tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome (Atlum), which, according to the neuroscientist, is the tool of choice for this line of work. It produces long strips of sticky tape with brain slices attached, all ready to be photographed through a powerful electron microscope. When these pictures are combined into 3D images, they reveal the inner wiring of the organ, a tangled mass of nervous spaghetti. (...) Map out our "connectome" – following other major "ome" projects such as the genome and transcriptome – and we will lay bare the biological code of our personalities, memories, skills and susceptibilities. Somewhere in our brains is who we are. (...) On average, each neuron forms 10,000 connections, through synapses with other nerve cells. Altogether, Lichtman estimates there are between 100tn and 1,000tn connections between neurons. (...) "To map the human brain at the cellular level, we're talking about 1m petabytes of information. Most people think that... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Abstract Abstract Author information Article tools print email download citation order reprints rights and permissions share/bookmark Among animals, Homo sapiens is unique in its capacity for widespread cooperation and prosocial behavior among large and genetically heterogeneous groups of individuals. This ultra-sociality figures largely in our success as a species. It is also an enduring evolutionary mystery. There is considerable support for the hypothesis that this facility is a function of our ability to establish, and enforce through sanctions, social norms. Third-party punishment of norm violations (“I punish you because you harmed him”) seems especially crucial for the evolutionary stability of cooperation and is the cornerstone of modern systems of criminal justice. In this commentary, we outline some potential cognitive and neural processes that may underlie the ability to learn norms, to follow norms and to enforce norms through third-party punishment. We propose that such... more... - Ami Iida

"The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study. (...) “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” (...) “The wiring of the mature brain appears to mirror three primal pathways established in embryonic development.” (...) “Before, we had just driving directions. Now, we have a map showing how all the highways and byways are interconnected,” said Wedeen. “Brain wiring is not like the wiring in your basement, where it just needs to connect the right endpoints. Rather, the grid is the language of the brain and wiring and re-wiring work by modifying it.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"By looking at how the pathways fit in the brain, we anticipated the connectivity to resemble that of a bowl of spaghetti, a very narrow and discreet object," (...) "We discovered that the pathways in the top of the brain are all organized like woven sheets with the fibers running in two directions in the sheets and in a third direction perpendicular to the sheets. These sheets all... more... - Amira

hmmm grid ha.. (cilgin teori ureticem quantum muantum) - bebekafa

"Certain genes and proteins that promote growth and development of embryos also play a surprising role in sending chemical signals that help adults learn, remember, forget and perhaps become addicted, University of Utah biologists have discovered. "We found that these molecules and signaling pathways [named Wnt] do not retire after development of the organism, but have a new and surprising role in the adult. They are called back to action to change the properties of the nervous system in response to experience," (...) "Almost certainly what we have discovered is going on in our brain as well," (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Synapse Plasticity is the Basis of Learning and Memory (...) Proteins known as receptors are delivered to the synapses or removed from them to strengthen or weaken the connection. (...) The Wnt signaling identified in the new study "tells the depot to put more receptors into the synapse -- or not," (...) By crippling various genes in the worms, the researchers identified the "signaling... more... - Amira

Some topics covered: Commonality between Turing machines and biological cells \\ Assessing the divide between neuroscience and computing \\ Impact of Turing's influential work on morphogenesis \\ Incomputable reality: natural world's interconnectivity should inspire better models of the Universe \\ + Podcast by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Authors@Google presents George DYSON, re: his new book _Turing's Cathedral_ http://youtu.be/_FibuHyIHnU -- 7 March 2012. \\ Related: viral geneticist, Nils Aall BARRICELLI, shows up at Princeton in early 1953 and begins experiments to see if he could inoculate a two-dimensional matrix with random strings that can self-replicate and cross-breed. But von Neumann's papers on self-reproducing automata never mentioned Barricelli. http://edge.org/convers... - Adriano

"MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory. The trick is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, which involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they’re sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject’s skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons. We finally have proof that memories (engrams, in neuropsychology speak) are physical rather than conceptual. We now know that specific memories could be erased." Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram, http://www.nature.com/nature... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The brain isn’t interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past,” “Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. That might make our memories less accurate, but it probably also makes them more relevant to the future.” (…) The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In my brain, a network of cells is constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade. (…) Reconsolidation provides a mechanistic explanation for these errors. (...) Why every memoir should be classified as fiction, and why it’s so disturbingly easy to implant false recollections. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The larger lesson is that because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. (…) Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. (...) It appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to... more... - Amira

My best friend has an amazing memory. She remembers things from years ago while I'm scrambling to remember things that happened last week. - Shevonne

"There are at least three qualitatively different areas of intersection I can think of 1) use machine learning ideas as normative models of what the nervous system does (should do) \ 2) use machine learning to analyse neuroscience data, such as neural recordings \ 3) neuro-inspired machine learning methods. ... one of the best machine learning conferences is called Neural Information Processing Systems, and one of the good journals in the field is called Neural Computation." - Adriano from Bookmarklet