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
Tag Archives: brain
Plastic Fantastic: Developing Fluid Intelligence
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]
The Matter of Mind
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]
A Chemical Brain To Control Nanobots
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.
[story and image via BBC Science/Nature. Thanks to Kian Momtahan for the link!]
"Mind-reading" machines beginning to appear
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.)
[tags]technology, brain, telepathy, communication[/tags]