Futurismic

A bold claim (or maybe not), but evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse thinks he can back it up.

[He] compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point….

People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan…very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose….

But too much emotional acuity — when individuals overanalyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.

[Wingnut by Gibna Kebira]

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Synesthesia is that odd blending-together of senses.  Those of us who don’t have it would probably pay to “taste” shapes or “hear” colors, at least temporarily.  A new form of synesthesia has been discovered: “hearing-motion.”  Cal Tech researchers set out to create a task in which synesthetes would have the advantage.

The researchers presented four self-professed synesthetes and 10 nonsynesthetes with 100 pairs of Morse code–like rhythmic sequences, each composed of either auditory beeps or flashes of white on a black background. The participants judged whether the two sequences in each pair were the same or different.

Both groups judged auditory patterns accurately about 85 percent of the time, the researchers report in the August 5 issue of Current Biology. On the visual trials, nonsynesthetes’ judgments fell to nearly chance levels, a result that corroborates other research showing that most people are better at judging auditory patterns than assessing visual patterns. In contrast, synesthetes—who reported hearing sounds such as beeps or taps in time with the visual signals—distinguished matching from nonmatching rhythms 75 percent of the time.

The writer’s assignment is to invent a job in which synesthesia would be a requirement.

[Story: Scientific American; image: Charkrem]

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Controlling mechanical and electronic devices with nothing but the power of your own thoughts is a science fiction trope almost as old as the genre itself, and like many other tropes it’s edging towards plausibility at quite a speed. [image by mize2oo5]

Futurismic has mentioned brain-computer interfaces a few times before, and the essential framework of the technology is fairly well established. However, the high costs involved mean that beyond research and rehabilitation there aren’t many truly practical applications right now.

But that’s not stopping the researchers thinking big, as in this Popular Mechanics article:

“… the research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room—or in another building. And it’s not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that’s moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it’s seeing.”

So, great news for the prospect of telecommuting - almost all manufacturing jobs could be done from the comfort of your armchair, for example. The flipside being, of course, that it would make offshore outsourcing an even more viable option than it is now. [story via SlashDot]

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There has been another development in the ongoing effort to map the human brain. Using a new technique called diffusion tensor imaging, scientists at Indiana University have created the first high resolution map of the human cortical network:

Diffusion imaging is a new twist on MRI that uses magnetic resonance signals to track the movement of water molecules in the brain. In gray matter, water tends to diffuse multidirectionally. But in white matter, it diffuses along the length of neural wires, called axons, and scientists can use these diffusion measurements to map the fibers.

An intriguing discovery is that of a “core” area - so called by cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Sporns - of highly interconnected neurons near the back of the head:

The node lies on the shortest path between many different parts of the neural network. “It’s highly connected amongst itself, but also highly central with respect to the rest of the brain,” says Sporns. “Network studies in other fields, from the Internet to protein interaction networks, suggest that these kinds of highly connected nodes tend to be very important for determining what the network does as a whole.”

It’s interesting how research in diverse areas of science can inform each other: such that studies of the behaviour of networks, or waves, or mathematical ratios, can crop up again and again.

[story via Technology Review][image from Mikey G Ottowa on flickr]

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Mac Tonnies is planning a voyage into inner space. Where else can he go to find out what’s happening in the Real reality that our brains keep hidden from us? Continue reading “The Existential Buffer - how and why our brains filter the Here and Now”

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A recent topic of interest in the reputable journals of opinion, including Wired Magazine and The Independent has been the possibility of artificially enhancing human intelligence. Methods suggested include Viagra for your Brain, or nootropics: drugs that are thought to enhance intelligence and cognitive ability.

Examples include ritalin, a drug used primarily to help ADHD sufferers which is also claimed to promote alertness and concentration in healthy people, and modafinil, a drug designed to combat sleep disorders but which is also being used to extend the period for which people can stay awake and active.

Fortunately there are also options for squares like myself who don’t have the guts to pop pills bought on the Net: algorithmic approaches to learning, and most recently the possibility of boosting IQ by enhancing fluid intelligence:

Most IQ tests attempt to measure two types of intelligence–crystallized and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence draws on existing skills, knowledge and experiences to solve problems by accessing information from long-term memory.

Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems.

The research by brain boffins Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl appears to occupy the class of scientific experiments entitled confirming the bleedin’ obvious (facetiousness aside, this is of course as necessary and laudable as any scientific endeavour :-)) :

Researchers gathered four groups of volunteers and trained their working memories using a complex training task called “dual n-back training,” which presented both auditory and visual cues that participants had to temporarily store and recall.

Participants received the training during a half hour session held once a day for either eight, 12, 17 or 19 days. For each of these training periods, researchers tested participants’ gains in fluid intelligence. They compared the results against those of control groups to be sure the volunteers actually improved their fluid intelligence, not merely their test-taking skills.

The results were surprising. While the control groups made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, the trained groups improved considerably more than the control groups. Further, the longer the participants trained, the larger were their intelligence gains.

“Our findings clearly show that training on certain memory tasks transfer to fluid intelligence,” says Jaeggi. “We also find that individuals with lower fluid intelligence scores at pre-test could profit from the training.”

So practice makes you better, if not perfect. As I’ve mentioned before, combining a better understanding of learning methods with drugs that have a direct affect on cognitive ability will have a huge impact on life over the course of the next century, even changing what it means to be human.

[main story via PhysOrg][other stories from The Independent and Wired][images by e-magic and LoreleiRanveig]

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It is always difficult to predict the next big revolution in science and technology. However it seems extremely likely that the scientific and technological history of the next thirty years will be dominated by discoveries and revelations about that most complex of organs: the human brain.

The latest discovery by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported in The Guardian concerns how words are encoded in the brain. The scientists have developed a device that can read a person’s mind from brain scans.

Once it has been trained on an individual subject’s thoughts, the computer model can analyse new brain scan images and work out which noun a person is thinking about - even with words that the model has never encountered before.

The model is based on the way nouns are associated in the brain with verbs such as see, hear, listen and taste. The research will inevitably raise fears that scientists could soon be able to read a person’s mind without them realising.

Unfortunately prospective telepaths are going to be disappointed: first because the device needs to be “trained” for each individual and secondly because the person as to be lying perfectly still in an MRI scanner.

According to one of the researchers, computer scientist Tom Mitchell:

“…the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”

Meanwhile in Japan a paralysed man has been able to manipulate a virtual Internet character:

The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years, can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

The potential in this research is mind-blowing. Imagine a video game controlled by thought. Imagine the educational opportunities of fully immersive and fully interactive virtual worlds. Many people already live a large part of their lives in virtual relities of one sort or another. And if they can respond to your merest thought they would become ever more compelling places.

[First story from The Guardian and PhysOrg][Second story from Physorg][image by Redvers]

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Nanotechnology is perhaps the most rapidly advancing new technology out there right now. All kinds of nanomachines based on biochemical mechanisms, tiny structures of metal or other techniques are being created and studied in universities and laboratories around the world.

Scientists have now created a device two billionths of a metre in size that could work as a chemical ‘brain’ for a group of nanomachines. Potentially this could lead to their use in medical techniques such as nano-surgery on tumours.

“If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan. “But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”

Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.

“That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,” he told BBC News.

[story and image via BBC Science/Nature. Thanks to Kian Momtahan for the link!]

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A neckband that picks up nerve signals and translates them into speech has been demonstrated for the first time. (Via NewScientistTech.)

With training, a user can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound that the neckband picks up and relays wirelessly to a computer, which then converts them into words spoken by a voice synthesizer.

This same device has been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts.

Currently the system, called Audeo, can only recognize a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, but by the end of the year there’s supposed to be an improved version without a vocabulary limit. Although it will be slower–it’s based on phonemes, not whole words–it will allow people to say whatever they want, and should be a boon to people who have lost the ability to speak due to disease or injury.

It’s not the only “mind-reading” technology that’s been in the news recently, either. Researchers at the University of California have developed a system that uses functional MRI data to decode information from the visual cortex. Using it, the scientists were able to figure out which of more than 100 previously unseen photographs subjects were looking at.

What lies at the end of that road? Possibly the ability to access dreams and memories–assuming the way the brain processes dreams is analogous to visual stimuli.

And then there’s the “mind-reading” car that monitors a driver’s brain activity and reduces the amount of information displayed on the dash during stressful periods. In tests, the system has speeded up driver’s reactions by as much as 100 milliseconds–equivalent to reducing braking distance by nearly three metres at 100 kilometres per hour.

The phrase “I know what you’re thinking” has thus far only been addressed by one human to another, and only in a metaphorical sense.

Someday soon, our machines could make it literal.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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Okay, technically your typing fingers are already brain-machine interfaces, but they’re rather clumsy ones, especially if you’re not a great typist. Wouldn’t it be easier to just think at your computer to get it to do what you want it to do? (Via ScienceDaily.)

Well, as this fascinating overview of the state of the art makes clear, it’s coming. The lede:

Neuroscientists have significantly advanced brain-machine interface (BMI) technology to the point where severely handicapped people who cannot contract even one leg or arm muscle now can independently compose and send e-mails and operate a TV in their homes. They are using only their thoughts to execute these actions.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. (Photo from Wikipedia.)

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While it may obviously be some time before this technology becomes widely available to the average consumer, I’m fascinated to see a Japanese team of scientists developing a thought-control interface device that can direct the movement of a Second Life avatar. Something like that could really revolutionize the platform … although given the slightly hysterical media reports of, er, dubious pastimes in the virtual world, I’m sure people will leap to conclusions about why users would want their hands free … [Image by Pathfinder Linden]

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If you have a friend or co-worker with a paranoid streak (or who simply consumes too much tabloid media), they may have informed you that electrical fields can cause cancers to form in your brain. Well, now you can tell them that the opposite is the case - an Israeli company has developed a device for killing brain tumors using weak electrical fields. Of course, your friend will just tell you how that’s what the Illuminati want you to think, but that’s half the fun. [BeyondTheBeyond]

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Brain scans of a French civil servant reveal that, despite displaying no disability in his day to day life, his brain may be up to 50% smaller than average thanks to a bizarre complication of hydrocephalus. I don’t need to provide you with a punchline for this one.

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