prosthetic knowledge
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Pycortex WebGL MRI Viewer
WebGL in-browser interactive 3D map of the brain by James Gao:
This viewer shows how information about thousands of object and action categories is represented across human neocortex. The data come from brain activity measurements made using fMRI while a participant watched hours of movie trailers. Computational modeling procedures were used to determine how 1705 distinct object and action categories are represented in the brain.
Try it out here
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Greg A Dunn
After studying and graduating in Neuroscience, Greg devoted his time painting the microscopic parts of the brain on gold leaf in an Asian ink style:
I enjoy Asian art. I particularly love minimalist scroll and screen painting from the Edo period in Japan. I am also a fan of neuroscience. Therefore, it was a fine day when two of my passions came together upon the realization that the elegant forms of neurons (the cells that comprise your brain) can be painted expressively in the Asian sumi-e style. Neurons may be tiny in scale, but they posess the same beauty seen in traditional forms of the medium (trees, flowers, and animals).
I admire the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean masters because of their confidence in simplicity. I try to emulate this idea.
In October 2011 I finished my doctorate in Neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania. Since then I have been devoting my time to painting.
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Eye-tracking Fine Art: Odalisque a la culotte grise (Matisse), and the proposal of the “opsieme”
a - the original
b - areas of interest
c - foveal and perifoveal visionsJean Paul Courchia proposes the idea of the “opsieme”, a visual unit equivalent to the ‘phoneme’ and ‘graphemes’ used to deconstruct sounds and text:
According to cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, recognizing letters and their combinations — called graphemes — and then creating an interface between what’s written and what’s articulated (phonological awareness) is the way to gain access to the lexicon that we use to communicate. If we indeed pay attention to the basic elements that compose the written sentence, we find letters, syllables and words. However, the smallest significant element of the sentence is probably the grapheme, since the whole understanding process derives from it. The grapheme is the written equivalent of the oral phoneme. It is comprised of the smallest group of letters making a phoneme. For example, in French, the phoneme [o] has several graphemes : o, au, and eau. Unlike a letter, a grapheme represents better the phonology of a language, or what a language sounds like. The French language counts 130 graphemes.
Does this same concept apply to a painting or an image ? Just like in the reading process, the image undergoes several mutations between the retina and the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex, whereby the basic components of the image (forms, colors, orientation of the lines) are dissected first and then transmitted to the visual areas. It is only then that the image is reconstructed, and that it will be confronted against other known representations that are stored in our memory for an identification of the present image. Dismantling, reassembly and identification are the three steps in the process of the visual representation, whether artistic or natural …
… Fixation can be equated with the time necessary to identify the smallest significant visual unit in an image. Just as a phoneme is the smallest articulated unit, and a grapheme is the smallest written unit, we suggest opsieme as a designation for the smallest significant visual unit : « opsie » – from the Greek ops, opsis, which means eye, vision and « eme », suffix which signifies basic unit.
You can read the whole piece here
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Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells
From MIT News - Simply activating a tiny number of neurons can conjure an entire memory:
Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams.
But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie.
“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature. “This is the rigorously designed 21st-century test of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s early-1900s accidental observation suggesting that mind is based on matter.”(Image - An image of a transgenic mouse hippocampus | Image: Nikon Small World Gallery)
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MECHAPOLYPSE - Mind Controlled Dress - prototype
Electronic Couture - Nange Magro is creating a dress that changes shape based on it’s wearer’s brainwaves:
The level of concentration is calculated through the use of an EEG (electroencephalographic) chip (which sensors are located in the hat).
This one captures and decodes your brain waves.
The arduino is the element I’ve used to activate the dynamic characteristics of the dressIf you feel curious and want to know more you can always e-mail me at the address that you can find on my nange.co.uk . :)
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A bionic prosthetic eye that speaks the language of your brain
This is both fascinating and interesting …
A scientist talks about their work on prosthetic sight, working on a technique which could potentially benefit not only other prosthetic technologies, but also understanding of the brain.
Sheila Nirenberg seems to have successfully managed to create a visual encoder placed on the optic nerve which can transcode visual stimuli into a signal into the brain. From Extreme Tech:
Now, reading the brain’s output (as in a prosthetic arm) is one thing, but feeding data into the brain is something else entirely — and understanding the signals that travel from the retina, through the optic nerve, to the brain is really about as bleeding edge as it gets. Nirenberg still used a brute force technique, though: By taking a complete animal eye and attaching electrodes to the optic nerve, she measured the electric pulses — the coded signal — that a viewed image makes. You might not know what the code means, but if a retina always generates the same electric code when looking at a lion, and a different code when looking at a bookcase, you can then work backwards to derive the retina’s actual encoding technique.
Perhaps even cooler, though, Nirenberg insists that this same technique — wiring up electrodes to our sense organs and brute forcing the encoding technique — could also be used to produce prosthetic ears, or noses, or limbs that can actually feel. Presumably, at some point, with enough data points under our belt, we might begin to unravel the human brain’s overarching communication codecs, too.
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Mimicking the brain, in silicon (via MIT News)
New computer chip models how neurons communicate with each other at synapses:
For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain’s talent for learning new tasks.
MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.
With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. -
Extracting Video from the Brain via Future Feeder
Garret B. Stanley’s article, published in 1999 in the Journal of Neuroscience, outlines how activity of neurons can be decoded into a reconstructed image. Stanley claims the decoding algorithm is simple since each point in space can be reconstructed at high resolutions from 6 to 8 pairs of cells. The more neurons are tracked, the higher the quality of the reconstruction. The following still frames from a video (top) are actual reconstructions (bottom) from the activity of 177 cells in a cat’s brain.
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Neuroscience Art – Gold Leaf Painting via Adafruit Industries
Above: Hippocampal Pyramidal Neurons by Greg Dunn (more here)
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Six ways that artists hack your brain (New Scientist) Since humankind first put brush to canvas, artists have played with the mind and the senses to create sublime atmospheres and odd impressions. It is only recently, with a blossoming understanding of the way the brain deconstructs images, that neuroscientists and psychologists have finally begun to understand how these tricks work.
Here we take you on a grand tour of the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. You’ll find out how Claude Monet bypasses your consciousness and plugs straight into your emotions, how Salvador Dali triggers neural conflicts and how Renaissance art and trompe l’oeil fool us into believing the impossible. And we turn the spotlight on the artist’s mind, revealing how Wassily Kandinsky drew on his synaesthesia to produce some of the most celebrated artworks of the 20th century.Link to host page, which will lead you to six brief yet interesting subjects related to neuroscience and art
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The Brain That Changes Itself
is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It walks the reader through studies of patients suffering from neurological disorders to explain how our brains are constantly adapting. For a long time, neuroscience believed the brain was immutable – fixed - one part of the brain for each body part or function and that’s that. But recently the field of neuroplasticity, the idea that the organization and function of neurons can change, has gained support. The brain, is, in fact, adaptive.
Some fascinating examples:
- As we get better at something, the number of neurons required to perform that task decreases, and the whole system becomes faster and more efficient.
- In one experiment, a cat’s eye was sewn shut so the eye got no visual stimulation. When the eye was opened they found that the visual area in the brain map that normally processed input from the closed eye had failed to develop. Even further, the part of the brain that had been deprived began to process visual input from the open eye, “as though the brain didn’t want to waste any ‘cortical real estate’ and had found a way to rewire itself.”
- Falling in love is like taking cocaine. It lowers the threshold at which pleasure centers fire. Because the pleasure centers are firing so freely, “the enamored person falls in love not only with the beloved but with the world and romanticizes his view of it.” It makes us harder to experience pain and displeasure or aversion. When one falls in love, “millions of neural networks have to be obliterated and replaced with new ones,” and that is why falling in love often feels like a loss of identity.
- Interesting description of moving on from a love. “Often people cannot move on because they cannot yet grieve… In neuroplastic terms, if the romantic or the widow is to begin a new relationship without baggage, each must first rewire billions of connections in their brains. The world of mourning is piecemeal, Freud noted… We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go”
- This one neurologist at UCSD, Ramachandran, does a lot of research on phantom limbs. He has a bunch of Ted Talks, and I highly recommend watching if you want your mind blown.
- The work of some neuroscientists shows us that we can shape our genes, or rather our gene expression. This can be done through means of psychotherapy, that goes “deep into the brain and its neurons” and changes their structure. A psychoanalyst can be a “microsurgeon of the mind” to help patients make needed alternations in neuronal networks.
- One study showed that muscles get stronger if we imagine they are being exercised!
- Neurons that fire together wire together is the main mantra here. This means that the more a thought or action is repeated, the stronger the connection between the neurons. This is known as Hebbian theory, which is a little too much for me but interesting nonetheless.
Super fascinating book. I took notes on nearly every page.
via dihard / ronenreblogs / teachingliteracy / notational
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“ Stimulus Independent Thoughts (SITs)
n. Daydreaming or other thoughts unrelated to one’s current task or activity.
Contemporary neuroscientists have described a neural network associated with what they label as stimulus independent thoughts (SIT), a cortical network which is active when the brain is supposedly at rest. SIT, or “mind-wandering,” is a phenomenon generated during times of non-purposeful attention.—Leon Hoffman, “The Value of Zoning Out” (letter), The New York TImes, July 5, 2010
”— via Wordspy - from here -
Using Brain Scans To Make Movies (via PSFK)
MindSign Neuromarketing is helping develop a new kind of “neurocinema”. The company is using real-time brain scans to observe people’s reactions to on-screen activity, providing an inside look into what micro-details excites viewers the most.
Wired Explains:
The company uses the scanning technique to track blood flow to specific areas (especially the amygdalae, those darling little almonds of primal emotion) while a test subject watches a movie. Right now, the metrics are pretty crude, but in theory, studios could use fMRI to fine-tune a movie’s thrills, chills, and spills with clickwheel ease, keeping your brain perpetually at the redline. MindSign cofounder Philip Carlsen said in an NPR interview that he foresees a future where directors send their dailies (raw footage fresh from the set) to the MRI lab for optimization. “You can actually make your movie more activating,” he said, “based on subjects’ brains.”
MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots: One of its “videographs,” mapped over a trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, clearly shows viewers’ brains lighting up whenever a monkey appears onscreen. (Of course, if there’s one thing we don’t need a computer to tell us, it’s that monkeys are funny.) Now the company wants to replace that ancient analog heuristic, the dreaded focus group. Carlsen claims that focus group members not only misrepresent the likes and dislikes of the broader population — they can’t even articulate their own preferences. Often, they’ll tell a human researcher one thing while the fMRI reveals they’re feeling the opposite.
Wired: “Scott Brown on How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot”
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Blind man paints, creates accurate artwork. [VIDEO] (via noesgoes)
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World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale by World Science Festival
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.
Seen this awhile ago, but if you havn’t seen it, this is very inspiring.
