You’ll Probably Never Upload Your Mind Into A Computer
Many futurists predict that one day we’ll upload our minds into computers, where we’ll romp around in virtual reality environments. That’s possible — but there are still a number of thorny issues to consider. Here are eight reasons why your brain may never be digitized.
The visible brain has arrived — the consistency of Jell-O, as transparent and colorful as a child’s model, but vastly more useful.
Scientists at Stanford University reported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ.
Even more important, experts say, is that unlike earlier methods for making the tissue of brains and other organs transparent, the new process, called Clarity by its inventors, preserves the biochemistry of the brain so well that researchers can test it over and over again with chemicals that highlight specific structures and provide clues to past activity. The researchers say this process may help uncover the physical underpinnings of devastating mental disorders like schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and others. (via Brains as Clear as Jell-O for Scientists to Explore - NYTimes.com)
(via sscagnetti)
Autism: inside the brain bank
World Autism Day is on 2 April and new funding is in place to research the causes of the condition. But the programme now desperately needs tissue donors.
A severe shortage of brains is hampering potentially groundbreaking research into the causes and nature of autism. Although funding from the charity Autistica is in place for the research, it is extremely difficult to get people to donate their brains after death. And while many are happy to sign up to the national organ donation registry, the separate process of committing to brain donation has encountered resistance. The UK Brain Bank for Autism has appealed for brains for four years, but so far only 22 have been donated, slowing down the pace of research at a time when there is growing interest in a condition affecting as many as one in 100 people.
In an experiment that might seem like something only a mad scientist would conjure, researchers injected human brain cells into the brains of mice to see how it would affect the way the mice thought. It did: the mice got smarter. But the cognition boosting cells weren’t neurons, they were the red-headed step-children of neuroscience called astrocytes. The study turns on its head the role historically attributed to astrocytes of simply supporting the all important function of neurons without playing a significant role in how we learn and think. It may very well be that humans owe much of their unique cognitive capabilities to astrocytes.
(Source: nothingman)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The scientists call it a “brain link,” and it is the closest anyone has gotten to a real-life “mind meld”: the thoughts of a rat romping around a lab in Brazil were captured by electronic sensors and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States.
The result: the second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior, researchers reported on Thursday in Scientific Reports, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group.
Neat. I wonder how it affects the receiver’s cognition, though? Can Rat B tell Rat A’s incoming thoughts aren’t his own? When applied to humans, does it feel like someone else’s mind is communicating with yours, or does it feel more like a random unbidden thought? Or, scarier still, would it smack around your perception enough to make it seem like a higher power was talking to you?
All stuff to be ironed out later, of course. I still couldn’t help but picture the one scene in the first Ghost in the Shell manga where the nurse is explaining how cyberbrain-to-cyberbrain communication works to the guy she’s giving an upgrade to.
Three Radical New Brain-Mapping Tools Obama’s Plan Could Deliver
The Obama administration wants to make a huge investment in mapping the human brain, according to The New York Times. How can they get the most bang for their buck? We have details on three future technologies that are being eyed by the scientists behind the bold proposal.
The U.S. already has one big brain-mapping effort under way, the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map the connections between regions of the human brain. The new project would go beyond this static depiction and map the activity of individual neurons in real time.
“All the really interesting features of the brain — language, perception, cognition, the mind — emerge from collections of neurons interacting with each other in ways we don’t understand,” said neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University, one of the architects of the proposed project. It’s those interactions, the electrochemical blips coursing through networks of interconnected neurons, that the new Brain Activity Map project aims to capture.
The Connectome project focuses mostly on static images of the brain. Although it does include some measures of brain activity, the fMRI scans it will use provide a view that’s something like that of a city seen from an airplane window. What the scientists behind the proposed Brain Activity Map want instead are detailed street maps with real-time traffic info. Ideally, they want to record every blip of every neuron in a network of thousands, or even millions.
The scientists hope they’ll get as much as $3 billion over the next decade to build a new set of dream tools for studying how the human brain works when it’s healthy and what goes wrong in disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Here are three ideas they’ve discussed, all in various stages of development.
“Sure, they sound far-fetched,” Donoghue said. “But we’re on the cusp of being able to do them.”
(via nothingman)
Woo, neat stuff. Also, I was amused that as soon as I thought, “hey, it’d be like how Geordi LaForge sees things,” I scrolled down and someone had posted exactly that.
(Source: nothingman)
Researchers Find Causality in the Eye of the Beholder
We rely on our visual system more heavily than previously thought in determining the causality of events. A team of researchers has shown that, in making judgments about causality, we don’t always need to use cognitive reasoning. In some cases, our visual brain—the brain areas that process what the eyes sense—can make these judgments rapidly and automatically.
The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology.
“Our study reveals that causality can be computed at an early level in the visual system,” said Martin Rolfs, who conducted much of the research as a post-doctoral fellow in NYU’s Department of Psychology. “This finding ends a long-standing debate over how some visual events are processed: we show that our eyes can quickly make assessments about cause-and-effect—without the help of our cognitive systems.”
Rolfs is currently a research group leader at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology of Berlin’s Humboldt University. The study’s other co-authors were Michael Dambacher, post-doctoral researcher at the universities of Potsdam and Konstanz, and Patrick Cavanagh, professor at Université Paris Descartes.
We frequently make rapid judgments of causality (“The ball knocked the glass off the table”), animacy (“Look out, that thing is alive!”), or intention (“He meant to help her”). These judgments are complex enough that many believe that substantial cognitive reasoning is required—we need our brains to tell us what our eyes have seen. However, some judgments are so rapid and effortless that they “feel” perceptual – we can make them using only our visual systems, with no thinking required.
It is not yet clear which judgments require significant cognitive processing and which may be mediated solely by our visual system. In the Current Biology study, the researchers investigated one of these—causality judgments—in an effort to better understand the division of labor between visual and cognitive processes.
Oh man, thats actually a super critical neurocognitive distinction, considering that this might imply WHY we might think so little upon what we see and observe in objects as well as other people…and in turn, the opinions we form.
Gotta keep an eye out for future research into more specific examples on this.
“When autistic children are born, Courchesne’s research suggests, they have an abundance of neurons jammed into an average-size brain. Over the first few years, the neurons get bigger and sprout thousands of branches to join other neurons. The extra neurons in the autistic brain probably send out a vast number of extra connections to other neurons. This overwiring may interfere with normal development of language and social behavior in young children. It would also explain the excess brain size seen in the MRI scans.” (cited from this article written earlier from Discover Magazine’s website)
Huh. I wonder if that in particular is why overstimulation is such a problem for those with severe autism.
(Source: nothingman)
I got a bit distracted from my dancing gifs project and wrote a program that applies glowy...
get off of there cat. you do not know how to do my job. i do not need or want your help.
what even is eurovision
ok
