Here’s a neurobiologist’s tale of trying to keep professional distance w/ his monkey study subject, Santiago.
He gets into how he taught Santiago to play a video game and eventually found himself in a battle of wills.
(via Radio Lab)
Holy S*%t (via Pinktentacle):
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow.
Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.…
ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”
The next step would be to go in the other direction – planting images in the brain – and then we’d pretty much have the foundation laid for the Matrix.
Japan, a country that can’t take care of it’s old people, is laying the groundwork for turning us all into batteries.
Thanks Japan.
(hat tip Nicholas)
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This reminds me of a New Yorker article that my friend Jason told me about the other day.
The article tells the story of a woman who contracted HIV, then got shingles, and eventually developed an insatiable itch on her head:
She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.…
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
Doctors, having tried all kinds of other stuff, decided to sever the remaining nerves to the itchy region on her head.
The itch went away for a while but eventually returned.
In the end, the itch was not a sensation rooted in her body. It was rooted in her brain.
The article goes on to discuss a new way of looking at how our brain relates to the body:
The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.
I’d argue that all of this is evidence that the mind and do not run in sequence, they run in parallel. The mind keeps it’s own representation of the body, separate from the actual nerves in our flesh.
A mental avatar of sorts.
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Just as the swedish study demonstrates how our bodily perceptions are very malleable, the story of this lady’s itch shows how the mind maintains a separate representation of the body which can sometimes get messed up, or possibly even hacked.
I was disappointed with AP’s treatment above.
The philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of this research are pretty rich and it’s lame that AP didn’t pick up those threads.
National Geographic’s treatment was a lot more in depth…
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Radiolab did a really good show called ‘Who am I‘ on some of these themes of the mind-body connection and what happens when wiring gets off.
In the show, they talk to U.C. San Diego Neurologist, V.S. Ramachandran who has done some really awesome research and treatment with people suffering pain in their phantom limbs.
Here’s an interesting study looking at a type of visual display for text and its impact on reading comprehension and efficiency:
Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF), transforms block-shaped text into cascading patterns that help readers identify grammatical structure. The new method integrates converging evidence from educational, visual, and cognitive research, and is made feasible through computer-executed algorithms and electronic displays.
Regular text of the Declaration of Independence…
VSTF text of the Declaration of Independence…
Thinking about it, it’s really not a new idea.
Poets do this all the time. But the findings in this field of research are pretty interesting…
This type of text activates the right brain:
Brain imaging research has also shown that reading sentences with complex syntactic structure not only activates areas in the left frontal cortex associated with working memory, but also activates large areas in the right cerebral hemisphere associated with pattern recognition; these areas are not activated with syntactically simpler sentences of similar length and semantic content (Caplan et al., 2001; Patel, 2003). These brain studies suggest that assisting readers’ syntactic processing could free up cognitive resources for higher level comprehension activities.
This type of text also bumped up reading comprehension in the study:
Scores on the comprehension tests were 40% higher with the visual-syntactic format.
It’s nice to see people are looking into this. Convention is overrated.
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This reminds me of some of the After Effects work that is coming out that uses dynamic text and music for impact.
The number 1 slot went to a consumer gene testing service:
We are at the beginning of a personal-genomics revolution that will transform not only how we take care of ourselves but also what we mean by personal information. In the past, only élite researchers had access to their genetic fingerprints, but now personal genotyping is available to anyone who orders the service online and mails in a spit sample. Not everything about how this information will be used is clear yet — 23andMe has stirred up debate about issues ranging from how meaningful the results are to how to prevent genetic discrimination — but the curtain has been pulled back, and it can never be closed again. And so for pioneering retail genomics, 23andMe’s DNA-testing service is Time’s 2008 Invention of the Year.
Hulu came in number 4.
Here are some others that I thought are kind of cool:
16. The Dynamic Tower
20. The Everything Game
24. Bionic Contacts
32. Facebook for Spies
49. Sound-Enhanced Food
Robert Krulwich (of NPR/Radio Lab) has an interesting story up about the two sets of bacteria that we have inside of us – one passed down from parents, the other a byproduct of our environment:
In studies on mice, their bacteria seems to affect weight gain…
Biologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis became quite well known a few years ago for a group of very skinny mice in his lab. The mice were skinny because they had no bacteria in their intestines. Gordon had kept them completely bacteria-free. If a bacteria-free mouse eats, food passes right through the intestine, significantly undigested.So without bacteria, the mouse can eat and eat and eat and never gain weight. But when Gordon exposed the mice to “this big, bad, dirty world,” as Gibson calls it, the mice suddenly turned their food into more calories and gained weight. So bacteria matter. Apparently, they can digest food far more efficiently.
So controlling these bacteria may allow doctors to prevent disease (it seems to be working in mice):
University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky, with collaborators from Yale University, recently reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of type 1 diabetes in lab mice. “By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent type 1 diabetes,” he told The Wall Street Journal.The bottom line: We now have two sets of genes to think about — the ones we got from our parents and the ones of organisms living inside us. Our parents’ genes we can’t change, but the other set? Now that is one of the newest and most exciting fields in cell biology.
I could see this becoming a whole new angle on weight loss…”what kind of bacteria do you have?”
(hat tip Catherine)
(via Neatorama)
Children of Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, have the earliest memories of any culture studied:
New clues to why Māori adults tend to have the earliest childhood memories of any culture studied so far are being revealed by University of Otago research.The study by Department of Psychology researchers found that Māori mothers appear to talk with their children in richer ways about significant events involving them, such as their birth.
This brings of questions of storytelling or narrative and memory formation.
It could be simple: exposure to powerful narrative – especially about your own birth – makes a lasting impact on the memories you bank.
Or it could expose what types of stories prove more memorable:
After categorising conversations for the level and type of detail mothers provided, they found that Māori mothers provided more references to time and emotions in their birth stories than European mothers, she says.
“We found that the richness of the style in which mothers related the birth stories strongly predicted how good children were at talking about more recent past events they had experienced.”
In the end, it confirms that from an extremely early age we respond to well-told stories.
Another reason to drop the baby talk.
Watching Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk “My stroke of insight” made me think of Radio Lab’s episode “Who am I?“
This episode included an interview with Julian Keenan, a neurologist that studies self recognition.
Keenan discussed a study involving morph software and a drug that anaesthetises the brain.
He’d photograph his subjects and combine their images with images of famous people using the morph software. Then he’d inject the drug, sodium amatol, into their brain hemispheres and have them look at the images with half their brains turned off.
In Keenan’s own words:
The results were quite interesting: when the right hemisphere was driving the brain and the left hemisphere was anaesthetised, the patients saw their own face out of this morph, and that’s how normals react to these morphs. You generally see your own face in the morphs.However without the right hemisphere, the patients didn’t seem to recognise their own face in the morph, and they identified, they thought the face that we presented them was a famous person’s face.
That the right brain is so crucial in visual recognition and self awareness raises some fundamental questions about how we know who we are, and how informed our sense of self may be.
I wonder whether we can reach an imbalance in brain hemisphere activity not by injecting a chemical but by not actively using the right brain hemisphere on a consistent basis – by living in a society that is driven by left-brained activities.
Thinking about Western Society, America specifically, I could see how the trappings of our culture and economy cultivate extremely overactive left brains…and could lend to more dormant, under-utilized right brains.
All of this makes me wonder whether if we might house under-stimulated, atrophied right brains and/or overstimulated, hyper-developed left brains. And if we did, would leave us imbalanced – and give us a truncated sense of who we are as individuals and possibly even as a society?
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Below is a video from the folks at Science Central that dovetails nicely with the science behind visual recognition and Keenan’s research mentioned above.
I feel as though these studies could point to a deeper level of machinery animating how we frame the other and the amorphous nature of the self.
It sounds like right brain might hold some of the answers to these questions…
