Brain and Mind

[brainandmind]

1. Selfless love makes us happy 2. Love is addictive 3. Intense romantic love can last for a lifetime 4. Male and female brains respond differently to love

[brainandmind]

3D Printing Powered by Thought

From BBC: It’s definitely not a bird. Nor is it a plane. The garish orange piece of plastic, small enough to hold in the palm of a hand, could pass for a missing limb of a toy tyrannosaurus. It may not look all that impressive, but it’s notable for two reasons. One is that the monster arm has emerged from a 3D printer. The other is that it is, in fact, the first ever object made from thought. This milestone was reached with little fanfare last month at the Santiago MakerSpace, a technology and design studio in the Chilean capital. The toy limb’s shape was determined according to the wishes of its designer, as gleaned from a headset picking up his brainwaves. The man in question was George Laskowsky, Chief Technical Officer of Thinker Thing, the Chilean start-up developing the mind-controlled 3D printing system. Engineers and designers have been using 3D printers for more than two decades. More recently, prices have tumbled and desk-top devices are increasingly being pitched at consumers. The touted possibilities appear to be endless – from bones to buildings to burritos – making some observers predict revolutionary consequences like the eventual demise of the factory. Because 3D printers build objects layer by layer from materials such as plastic or metal dust, a key advantage is the comparative freedom they give designers. Yet the design software is not easy to master, especially if you are four-years-old and haven’t yet learnt to hold a pencil properly. “What is the point of these printers if my son cannot design his own toy?” says Bryan Salt, CEO of Thinker Thing. “I realised that while there were a lot of people talking about the hardware of the printer no-one really seemed to be talking about how to actually use it.” In theory 3D printers could help unleash our inner creativity, freeing us from the constraints of traditional production methods. However, in practice those unwilling or unable to plough through the software instruction manual could be left downloading ready- made models designed by others. That’s where Emotional Evolutionary Design (EED), the software that allows Thinker Thing to interpret its users’ thoughts, comes in. Its current role is to power the Monster Dreamer Project, which will allow users to design their own fantastical creatures using the power of thought. Chilean children will get the first opportunity to try it out during tour of schools in the country at the end of this month. When those children sit in front of a computer running Monster Dreamer, they will be presented with a series of different body shapes in bubbles. These will mutate randomly, with built-in rules preventing them becoming too abstract. The children’s reactions to the changes will be picked up by an Emotiv EPOC headset, a $300 electroencephalography (EEG) device designed to pick up the electrical signals from brain cell interactions using fourteen sensors on the scalp. As different brain states such as excitement or boredom generate specific patterns of brain activity, the computer can identify the shapes associated with positive emotional responses. The favoured shapes will grow bigger on the screen, while the others shrink. The biggest shapes are combined to generate a body part, and the process is repeated for different body parts until the monster is complete. The final result should be a unique 3D model that is ready for printing as a solid object. Second nature Design steered by emotional responses is based on the notion that most people are better at critiquing a design than they are at thinking of new ideas from scratch, especially if they have no training. “One of the biggest bottlenecks right now with 3D printing is content,” says Professor Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York State. “We have iPods with no music. We have machines that can make almost anything but we do not have a lot of things to make with them.” Lipson’s lab is also working on evolving 3D models with the mind. EndlessForms, created by two of Lipson’s students, is a website that mimics nature’s way of creating new designs in small steps. At the start of the process users are presented with 15 three-dimensional shapes. Clicking on any two will combine them and produce fifteen new shapes based on those choices. If you wanted to make a cat, you might click on one shape with the semblance of a muzzle and another with two pointed, ear-like triangles on top. The computer would then offer up a series of new shapes that more closely resemble the cat you have in mind, and so on until the model reaches the desired shape. To reduce the time spent clicking, the researchers came to the same conclusion as the Thinker Thing team – feeding users’ thoughts back into the computer directly could make the process quicker. So, last year, the team used Emotiv EPOC headsets to read users’ brain signals and therefore determine their reactions. But then they ran into a problem. “At some point we were thinking it was only measuring the level of sweat because we were actually trying so hard to feel happy or sad about something,” says Lipson. No matter how many times they tried, the scientists could not find a reliable signal to use from the headset. The problem with cheap consumer headsets is that the signals they pick up are already weak. The skull dampens the small electrical impulses from the brain’s neurons and electrical signals from nearby facial muscles can overpower them. Some sceptics argue that consumer EEG devices are not really measuring thoughts at all. Others argue that for applications that only require basic feedback such as yes or no, the readings they generate can be accurate enough. “If they are simple positive or negative emotions, it can be 100%,” says Dr Olga Sourina, head of the Cognitive Human Computer Interaction Lab at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. “When you need to differ between more emotions like anger or fear, they can be less accurate.” Sourina has spent nine years working on improving the ability of computers to recognise emotions from EEG. With some of the limitations of consumer EEG technology in mind, Lipson and colleagues decided to monitor thoughts via the eyeballs. Eye tracking can identify the shapes that get the most attention, and this could be used to shape design processes. The snag is that without an EEG headset it is not possible to tell whether someone is looking at a shape because they find it strange or beautiful. Even so, the team’s research so far suggests that at the end of the process participants still feel they have managed to reach the desired design. There’s some way to go, but in the future a combination of brain scanning and eye tracking may be preferred to the trusty old mouse when it comes to 3D object design. Dream maker If and when that day comes, it still won’t be a case of closing your eyes, imagining a unicorn and hearing the printer take off. But recent work by two teams of neuroscientists suggests the idea of translating whole images from the mind to the design screen may not be as improbable as it sounds. “In principle, it is not farfetched at all,” says Professor Jack Gallant, from the University of California, Berkeley. “We have already published many papers where we reconstruct photographs or movies from what people have seen.” In 2011, Gallant’s team used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to show how computers can be trained to read the minds of those watching moving images. They built up a database of the activity in a key visual centre of the brain as three fellow researchers watched a compilation of Hollywood film trailer clips. Next the subjects watched a new set of clips. Based on the brain activity this generated, and the database created from the first phase of the experiment, the computer was asked to select segments of 5,000 hours of randomly selected YouTube clips that best matched the second sequence of clips. The results, although blurry, were recognisable as copies of the originals, and demonstrated for the first time the ability to decode moving images from the brain. A related advance came in April this year when Japanese scientists led by Yukiyasu Kamitani, of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, revealed they had made significant steps towards automated dream decoding. Three people had their brains scanned in a MRI machine while they slept. They were awoken when EEG signals indicated they had reached an early phase of sleep associated with dreaming. The researchers then asked them to describe their dreams, with the process being repeated until more than 200 reports had been collected for each person. Kamitani’s group then chose 20 categories of objects and scenes based on the words that occurred most frequently in the descriptions. They selected photos representing each category, and scanned their volunteers’ brains while they looked at them. Comparing the scans taken while participants were awake with those while they were dreaming allowed the accurate prediction of dream content 60-70% of the time, depending on the individuals, the brain areas involved and different objects and scenes involved. It may not yet be a fully formed “dream decoder”, but it does show that direct decoding mental images is a possibility. MRI scanners may be better at reading the brain than cheap EEG headsets, but that does not make them a practical or affordable solution for 3D printing. “As a giant three million dollar magnet, it is not something you would just wear around,” says Gallant. Even if these issues can be overcome, there are other obstacles. Seeing an object and imagining one may not produce the same brain signals. On top of this individuals vary widely in their abilities to dream up designs from scratch, and in the level of detail they can imagine. “I have been doing 3D modelling since it began back in the 80s,” said Salt. “And the process is that you build something and then you move it about. You do not sit down and think, I have something absolutely finite in my head and that is what I am going to build.” These challenges suggest the idea of 3D printing guided by fully formed mental images of users is, if not entirely farfetched, a long way from becoming reality. Combining sensors that can pick up human emotions with design software that can interpret and respond to them looks like the nearest we’re going to get to creating 3D objects from thought in the near future. So Thinker Thing’s twig-like orange monster arm, as unsophisticated as it may appear at first glance, may one day be celebrated as marking the start of a new and exciting way of moulding the things around us. “It is really something magical to be there, sat without moving a limb, and watching the designs evolve into something that you were thinking about,” says Laskowsky.

[brainandmind]

Thinker Thing, a start-up based in Santiago, Chile, says it has developed a way of printing 3D objects from people’s thoughts. (Copyright: Nisha Ligon)

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Visit Original Link

To understand speech, the brain has to quickly recognize the sounds used to form words. Now researchers have discovered a way to watch how the brain does this. They've found that the process of understanding speech involves highly specialized brain cells, which respond specifically to the dozen sounds produced by the human vocal tract.

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Cannabidiol enhances anandamide signaling and alleviates psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia

Safe and effective drugs used to treat schizophrenia are hard to come by due to the involvement of multiple neurotransmitter systems and the complex nature of the disorder.  Previous studies have found that delta-9-THC cannabinoid agonists can induce psychotic symptoms in both schizophrenics and healthy populations; suggesting that the hyperactivity of cannabinoid receptors leads to psychotic states.  This has not been validated.  Studies have shown that schizophrenic symptom intensity is negatively correlated with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of anandamide.  The blockade of anandamide degradation attenuates psychotic like behaviors.  Cannabidiol is associated with the reduction of the activity of the enzyme fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), increased CSF levels of anandamide and a decrease in psychotic symptoms. 

            In a double-blind, monocentered, randomized, parallel-group, controlled study, the effects of cannabidiol and amisulpride (a D2/D3 antagonist and currently the most effective drug treatment for schizophrenia) were compared.  Forty-two men and women, ages 18-50, with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizophreniform psychosis were selected for this study.  The study was conducted in a hospital setting using only acutely psychotic patients.  All participants were scanned for any illicit drugs and excluded in the case of substance use disorders, previous treatment with antipsychotics 3 months prior or treatment resistance.  In the drug groups, 200 mg (cannabidiol or anandamide) were administered the first day with a step-wise increase to four doses of 200 mg per day on day four and onward.  The positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) was the primary measure used to assess psychotic symptoms.  The extrapyramidal symptom scale (ESS) was used to measure side effects.  Symptoms were assessed at baseline, day 14 and day 28 (1 month study).

            Both the cannabidiol and amisulpride groups showed significant clinical improvement according to all four measures of the PANSS (total, positive, negative and general scores).  There was no significant difference between the two groups, suggesting cannabidiol is as effective at improving psychotic symptoms as amisulpride.  However, the cannabidiol group showed significantly less extrapyramidal symptoms including less weight gain and lower prolactin levels (a predictor of galactorrhoea and sexual dysfunction) than the amisulpride group.  The cannabidiol treatment did not significantly affect hepatic or cardiac functions. 

            CSF anandamide and FAAH substrate levels in the cannabidiol group were significantly higher than in the amisulpride group.  There was a significant association between the increased anandamide levels and a reduction in psychotic symptoms in the cannabidiol group that was not found in the amisulpride group.  This suggests that there is a functional link between the antipsychotic effects of cannabidiol and inhibition of anandamide degradation. 

            In antipsychotic naïve schizophrenic patients CSF anandamide levels are negatively correlated with psychotic symptoms.  However, the mechanism of action cannot yet be concluded.  Further studies should test the effects of selective FAAH inhibitors on psychotic symptoms as well as test the effectiveness of cannabidiol on treatment resistant patients.  

[neuroticthought]

by Neuroskeptic

“GB” is a 28 year old man with a curious condition: his optic nerves are in the wrong place.

Most people have an optic chiasm, a crossroads where half of the signals from each eye cross over the midline, in such a way that each half of the brain gets information from one side of space. GB, however, was born with achiasma – the absence of this crossover. It’s an extremely rare disorder in humans, although it’s more common in some breeds of animals, such as Belgian sheepdogs.

Here’s GB and a normal brain for comparison:

Canadian neurologists Davies-Thompson and colleagues describe GB in a new paper using functional neuroimaging to work out how his brain is organized.

In the absence of a left-right crossover, all of the signals from GB’s left eye end up in his left visual cortex, and vice versa. But the question was, how does the brain make sense of it? Normally, remember, each half of the cortex corresponds to half our visual field. But in GB’s brain, each half has to cope with the wholevisual field – twice as much space (even though it’s getting no more signals than normal.)

It turns out that the two halves of space overlap in GB’s visual cortex, as these fMRI results show:

The four colours represent the four quarters of the visual field, and the brain blobs that light up in response to them. Although the bottom and the top of space are separately represented, as they normally are, there’s complete overlap between the areas that respond to bottom-left and bottom-right stimulation, and likewise top-left and top-right. It’s possible that they are separately represented at a smaller scale, however.

Despite this, GB’s vision was remarkably good – he scored around 20/80 vision, one quarter as accurate as a typical person.

This is a fascinating case report, and vision neuroscientists will find much to ponder here. Still, what I’d love to know is how does it feel to have overlapping representations of the two sides of space? Does everything seem to be mirrored vertically? Does GB find it easier to tell objects apart when they’re above and below the other, compared to side-to-side?

Davies-Thompson, J., Scheel, M., Jane Lanyon, L., & Sinclair Barton, J. (2013). Functional organisation of visual pathways in a patient with no optic chiasm Neuropsychologia DOI:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.03.014

[brainandmind]

From sciencedaily.com:

Apr. 2, 2013 — Today at the White House, President Barack Obama unveiled the "BRAIN" Initiative -- a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury

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BRAIN Initiative project director Francis Collins discusses the most complicated biological structure in the universe. 

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Francis Collins: We need better drugs -- now

From TED:

In 2000 the world saw the first working draft of the human genome, and that's in no small part thanks to Francis Collins. Under his directorship at the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Human Genome Project was finished, a complete mapping of all 20,500 genes in the human genome, with a high-quality, reference sequence published in April 2003.

In 2009 President Obama nominated Collins as the director of the National Institutes of Health, and later that year he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In March 2013, Collins helped Obama introduce the BRAIN Initiative, an ambitious, well-funded program to map the human brain. Read more about the BRAIN Initiative >>

Collins is also a self-described serious Christian and the author of several books on science and faith, including The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

[brainandmind]

From Newscientist.com:

Neil Harbisson can only see shades of grey. So his prosthetic eyepiece, which he calls an “eyeborg”, interprets the colours for him and translates them into sound. Harbisson’s art sounds like a kind of inverse synaesthesia. But where synaesthetes experience numbers or letters as colours or even “taste” words, for example, Harbisson’s art is down to a precise transposition of colour into sound frequencies. As a result, he is able to create facial portraits purely out of sound, and he can tell you that the colour of Mozart’s music is mostly yellow.

[brainandmind]

Neil Harbisson: I listen to color

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The cyborg who can hear color

(Image: Dan Wilton/RedBulletin)

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This is the scientific article published in Nature by the Nicolelis Lab.  

Abstract:

A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an “encoder” rat performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a “decoder” rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the encoder rat's brain. These results demonstrated that a complex system was formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process, and store information and, hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and for biological computing devices.

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Dr. Miguel Nicolelis Explains Brain to Brain Interface Study Published in Scientific Reports

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Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is a professor at Duke University and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering.  

From his website: 

Although the Nicolelis Laboratory is best known for pioneering studies in neuronal population coding, Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) and neuroprosthetics in human patients and non-human primates, we have also developed an integrative approach to studying neurological and psychiatric disorders including Parkinsons disease and epilepsy. We believe this approach will allow the integration of molecular, cellular, systems, and behavioral data in the same animal, producing a more complete understanding of the nature of the neurophysiological alterations associated with these disorders.

[brainandmind]

Monkey's thoughts make robot walk from across the world