By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website The brain has specialist neurons for each of the five taste categories - salty, bitter, sour, sweet and umami - US scientists have discovered. The study, published in the journal Nature, should settle years of debate on how the brain perceives taste. The Columbia University team showed the separate taste sensors on the tongue had a matching partner in the brain. The scientists hope the findings could be used to help reverse the loss of taste sensation in the elderly. It is a myth that you taste sweet only on the tip of the tongue. Each of the roughly 8,000 taste buds scattered over the tongue is capable of sensing the full suite of tastes. But specialised cells within the taste bud are tuned to either salty, bitter, sour, sweet or umami tastes. When they detect the signal, a message is sent to the brain. Although how the brain deals with the information has been up for discussion. A team at Columbia University engineered mice so that their taste neurons would fluoresce when they were activated. They then trained their endoscopes on the neurons deep at their base of the brain. The animals were fed chemicals to trigger either a salty, bitter, sour, sweet or umami response on the tongue and the researchers monitored the change in the brain. They found a "hard wired" connection between tongue and brain. Prof Charles Zuker told the BBC News website: "The cells were beautifully tuned to discrete individual taste qualities, so you have a very nice match between the nature of the cells in your tongue and the quality they represent [in the brain]." It scotches the alternative idea that brain cells respond to multiple tastes. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 20295 - Posted: 11.10.2014

By Katy Waldman How much control do you have over how much control you think you have? The researchers Michael R. Ent and Roy F. Baumeister have been studying what makes a person more or less likely to believe in free will. Is it a deep connection to the philosophy of David Hume? An abiding faith in divine omnipotence? Try a really, really full bladder. In an online survey, 81 adults ages 18 to 70 reported the extent to which they felt hungry, tired, desirous of sex, and desirous of a toilet. They then rated the extent to which they considered themselves in command of their destinies. People experiencing intense physical needs were less likely to say they believed in free will. People who were not inexplicably taking an online survey while desperately holding in their pee (or starving, or wanting sex, or trying to stay awake) mostly claimed that the universe had handed them the keys to their lives. Also, people who brought their laptops with them into the bathroom to fill out the survey reported that they were God. (I kid on that last part.) Ent and Baumeister also used a survey to take the free will temperature of 23 people with panic disorder, 16 people with epilepsy, and 35 healthy controls. Those suffering from the two conditions—both of which can unpredictably plunge the mind into chaos—tended to put less stock in the notion of mental autonomy. There was a third experiment, too. I said earlier that people not taking an online survey while jonesing for various creature comforts mostly claimed that they wore the metaphysical pants. However, despite robust results for horniness, fatigue, and needing-to-go-ness, Ent and Baumeister didn’t initially see much correlation between people’s philosophical visions and their hunger levels. So they re-administered the survey to 112 new volunteers, some of whom were dieting and some of whom were not. © 2014 The Slate Group LLC.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 20294 - Posted: 11.10.2014

By Dr. Catherine A. Madison “Now why did I walk into this room? Oh, yes, looking for my …” This scenario, familiar to many, is most often a sign of normal aging — or of having too much on our minds. But when these events seem to be happening frequently, is it a more serious problem, such as Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia? Even more importantly, are there good health habits that can help lower the risk of these neurodegenerative conditions? Research continues to demonstrate that healthy lifestyles lower one’s risk of developing cognitive decline later in life. Wise food choices and lots of exercise are a good base, along with learning new material and keeping socially connected. But another key element to brain health is good sleep. We may take sleep for granted, but research suggests this is not a passive process. There is a growing consensus that sleep is linked to learning, memory, nerve cell remodeling and repair. Evidence also suggests lack of sleep can contribute to mood and immune disorders, as well as to a decline in overall health. Most of us have read the dos and don’ts of good sleep hygiene: avoid napping, don’t drink alcohol or caffeine close to bedtime, avoid late-evening exercise and sleep in a room that is quiet, dark and cool. We’ve also been told about sleep cycles, in which we typically progress from light sleep early in the night to slow wave sleep with rapid eye movement, or REM, later on. We need a balance of sleep cycles for optimal health.

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 20293 - Posted: 11.10.2014

Stem cells can be used to heal the damage in the brain caused by Parkinson's disease, according to scientists in Sweden. They said their study on rats heralded a "huge breakthrough" towards developing effective treatments. There is no cure for the disease, but medication and brain stimulation can alleviate symptoms. Parkinson's UK said there were many questions still to be answered before human trials could proceed. The disease is caused by the loss of nerve cells in the brain that produce the chemical dopamine ,which helps to control mood and movement. To simulate Parkinson's, Lund University researchers killed dopamine-producing neurons on one side of the rats' brains. They then converted human embryonic stem cells into neurons that produced dopamine. Parkinson's Disease Parkinson's is one of the commonest neurodegenerative diseases These were injected into the rats' brains, and the researchers found evidence that the damage was reversed. There have been no human clinical trials of stem-cell-derived neurons, but the researchers said they could be ready for testing by 2017. Malin Parmar, associate professor of developmental and regenerative neurobiology, said: "It's a huge breakthrough in the field [and] a stepping stone towards clinical trials." A similar method has been tried in a limited number of patients. It involved taking brain tissue from multiple aborted foetuses to heal the brain. Clinical trials were abandoned after mixed results, but about a third of the patients had foetal brain cells that functioned for 25 years. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 20292 - Posted: 11.08.2014

Carl Zimmer Milk is not just food. The more closely scientists examine it, the more complexity they find. Along with nutrients like protein and calcium, milk contains immune factors that protect infants from disease. It hosts a menagerie of microbes, too, some of which may colonize the guts of babies and help them digest food. Milk even contains a special sugar that can fertilize that microbial garden. Now, it turns out, milk also contains messages. A new study of monkeys, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, demonstrates that a hormone present in milk, cortisol, can have profound effects on how babies develop. Infant monkeys rely on cortisol to detect the condition of their mothers, the authors suggest, then adjust their growth and even shift their temperaments. Jeffrey French, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who was not involved in the study, praised its “remarkable sophistication” and said that it helped to change how we think about breast milk. “Milk serves almost like a pheromone, a chemical signal sent from one individual to another,” he said. Katie Hinde, a behavioral biologist at Harvard and lead author on the new study, and her colleagues studied 108 rhesus macaque mothers nursing infants at the California National Primate Research Center. The researchers collected samples of milk, measuring how much energy each provided and the cortisol it contained. Dr. Hinde and her colleagues also measured how much weight each nursing monkey gained and tracked its behavior. Cortisol serves many functions in mammals, but it is best known as a stress hormone. When cortisol courses through our bodies, it prepares us to handle alarming or fearful situations, increasing the brain’s consumption of glucose and suppressing the digestive system. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 20291 - Posted: 11.08.2014

By Greg Miller This robot causes people to experience the illusory sensation of someone standing behind them. © Alain Herzog/EPFL People who’ve stared death in the face and lived to tell about it—mountain climbers who’ve made a harrowing descent, say, or survivors of the World Trade Center attacks—sometimes report that just when their situation seemed impossible, a ghostly presence appeared. People with schizophrenia and certain types of neurological damage sometimes report similar experiences, which scientists call, aptly, “feeling of presence.” Now a team of neuroscientists says it has identified a set of brain regions that seems to be involved in generating this illusion. Better yet, they’ve built a robot that can cause ordinary people to experience it in the lab. The team was led by Olaf Blanke, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Blanke has a long-standing interest in creepy illusions of bodily perception. Studying these bizarre phenomena, he says, could point to clues about the biology of mental illness and the mechanisms of human consciousness. In 2006, for example, Blanke and colleagues published a paper in Nature that had one of the best titles you’ll ever see in a scientific journal: “Induction of an illusory shadow person.” In that study, they stimulated the brain of a young woman who was awaiting brain surgery for severe epilepsy. Surgeons had implanted electrodes on the surface of her brain to monitor her seizures, and when the researchers passed a mild current through the electrodes, stimulating a small region at the intersection of the temporal and parietal lobes of her brain, she experienced what she described as a shadowy presence lurking nearby, mimicking her own posture. Colored areas indicate regions of overlap in the lesions of neurological patients who experienced feeling of presence illusions. © 2014 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 20290 - Posted: 11.08.2014

By Tracy Jarrett Autism advocates on Friday applauded Jerry Seinfeld's disclosure that he may be autistic, while warning against making him the poster boy for a disorder that is no laughing matter. “I think, on a very drawn-out scale, I think I’m on the spectrum,” Seinfeld told NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams. "Basic social engagement is really a struggle. I'm very literal, when people talk to me and they use expressions, sometimes I don't know what they're saying," he said. "But I don't see it as dysfunctional, I just think of it as an alternate mindset." Seinfeld's revelation sends a positive message that the autism community is much larger and more diverse than people often understand, Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Advocacy Network, told NBC News. Ne’eman is living with autism and says that there is still a tremendous amount of stigma surrounding autism that hinders the opportunities available to those with the disorder. “Think about what this does for a closeted autistic person who goes into the workplace knowing that their co-workers have just seen somebody they know, respect, and have a positive opinion of, like Jerry Seinfeld, identify in this way — it’s a valuable and important step in building a greater tolerance for autism,” Ne’eman said. Liz Feld, president of Autism Speaks, agreed, pointing out that “there are many people on the autism spectrum who can relate to Jerry’s heartfelt comments about his own experiences.”

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 20289 - Posted: 11.08.2014

by Penny Sarchet It's frustrating when your smartphone loses its signal in the middle of a call or when downloading a webpage. But for bats, a sudden loss of its sonar signal means missing an insect meal in mid-flight. Now there's evidence to suggest that bats are sneakily using sonar jamming techniques to make their fellow hunters miss their tasty targets. Like other bats, the Mexican free-tailed bat uses echolocation to pinpoint prey insects in the dark. But when many bats hunt in the same space, they can interfere with each other's echoes, making detection more difficult. Jamming happens when a sound disrupts a bat's ability to extract location information from the echoes returning from its prey, explains Aaron Corcoran of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Previous research has shown that Mexican free-tailed bats can get around this jamming by switching to higher pitches. Using different sound frequencies to map the hunting grounds around them allows many bats to hunt in the same space. In these studies, jamming of each other's signals was seemingly inadvertent – a simple consequence of two bats attempting to echolocate in close proximity. But Corcoran has found evidence of sneakier goings-on. Corcoran has found a second type of sonar jamming in these bats – intentional sabotage of a fellow bat. "In this study, the jamming is on purpose and the jamming signal has been designed by evolution to maximally disrupt the other bat's echolocation," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 20288 - Posted: 11.08.2014

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness; Robotics
Link ID: 20287 - Posted: 11.08.2014

Sara Reardon Delivering medications to the brain could become easier, thanks to molecules that can escort drugs through the notoriously impervious sheath that separates blood vessels from neurons. In a proof-of-concept study in monkeys, biologists used the system to reduce levels of the protein amyloid-β, which accumulates in the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease1. The blood–brain barrier is a layer of cells lining the inner surface of the capillaries that feed the central nervous system. It is nature's way of protecting the delicate brain from infectious agents and toxic compounds, while letting nutrients and oxygen in and waste products out. Because the barrier strictly regulates the passage of larger molecules and often prevents drug molecules from entering the brain, it has long posed one of the most difficult challenges in developing treatments for brain disorders. Several approaches to bypassing the barrier are being tested, including nanoparticles that are small enough to pass through the barrier's cellular membranes and deliver their payload; catheters that carry a drug directly into the brain; and ultrasound pulses that push microbubbles through the barrier. But no approach has yet found broad therapeutic application. Neurobiologist Ryan Watts and his colleagues at the biotechnology company Genentech in South San Francisco have sought to break through the barrier by exploiting transferrin, a protein that sits on the surface of blood vessels and carries iron into the brain. The team created an antibody with two ends. One end binds loosely to transferrin and uses the protein to transport itself into the brain. And once the antibody is inside, its other end targets an enzyme called β-secretase 1 (BACE1), which produces amyloid-β. Crucially, the antibody binds more tightly to BACE1 than to transferrin, and this pulls it off the blood vessel and into the brain. It locks BACE1 shut and prevents it from making amyloid-β. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 20286 - Posted: 11.06.2014

|By Lindsey Konkel and Environmental Health News New York City children exposed in the womb to high levels of pollutants in vehicle exhaust had a five times higher risk of attention problems at age 9, according to research by Columbia University scientists published Wednesday. The study adds to earlier evidence that mothers' exposures to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and other organic materials, are linked to children's behavioral problems associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “Our research suggests that environmental factors may be contributing to attention problems in a significant way,” said Frederica Perera, an environmental health scientist at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health who was the study's lead author. About one in 10 U.S. kids is diagnosed with ADHD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with ADHD are at greater risk of poor academic performance, risky behaviors and lower earnings in adulthood, the researchers wrote. “Air pollution has been linked to adverse effects on attention span, behavior and cognitive functioning in research from around the globe. There is little question that air pollutants may pose a variety of potential health risks to children of all ages, possibly beginning in the womb,” said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York. He did not participate in the new study. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 20285 - Posted: 11.06.2014

by Helen Thomson A MAN with the delusional belief that an impostor has taken his wife's place is helping shed light on how we recognise loved ones. Capgras syndrome is a rare condition in which a person insists that a person they are close to – most commonly a spouse – has been replaced by an impostor. Sometimes they even believe that a much-loved pet has also been replaced by a lookalike. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people with Capgras only misidentify the people that they are closest to. Chris Fiacconi at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and his team wanted to explore this. They performed recognition tests and brain scans on two male volunteers with dementia – one who had Capgras, and one who didn't – and compared the results with those of 10 healthy men of a similar age. For months, the man with Capgras believed that his wife had been replaced by an impostor and was resistant to any counterargument, often asking his son why he was so convinced that the woman was his mother. First the team tested whether or not the volunteers could recognise celebrities they would have been familiar with throughout their lifetime, such as Marilyn Monroe. Volunteers were presented with celebrities' names, voices or pictures, and asked if they recognised them and, if so, how much information they could recall about that person. The man with Capgras was more likely to misidentify the celebrities by face or voice compared with the volunteer without Capgras, or the 10 healthy men. None of the volunteers had problems identifying celebrities by name (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, doi.org/wrw). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 20284 - Posted: 11.06.2014

By NICK BILTON Ebola sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Bird flu and SARS also send shivers down my spine. But I’ll tell you what scares me most: artificial intelligence. The first three, with enough resources, humans can stop. The last, which humans are creating, could soon become unstoppable. Before we get into what could possibly go wrong, let me first explain what artificial intelligence is. Actually, skip that. I’ll let someone else explain it: Grab an iPhone and ask Siri about the weather or stocks. Or tell her “I’m drunk.” Her answers are artificially intelligent. Right now these artificially intelligent machines are pretty cute and innocent, but as they are given more power in society, these machines may not take long to spiral out of control. In the beginning, the glitches will be small but eventful. Maybe a rogue computer momentarily derails the stock market, causing billions in damage. Or a driverless car freezes on the highway because a software update goes awry. But the upheavals can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease. Nick Bostrom, author of the book “Superintelligence,” lays out a number of petrifying doomsday settings. One envisions self-replicating nanobots, which are microscopic robots designed to make copies of themselves. In a positive situation, these bots could fight diseases in the human body or eat radioactive material on the planet. But, Mr. Bostrom says, a “person of malicious intent in possession of this technology might cause the extinction of intelligent life on Earth.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics; Intelligence
Link ID: 20283 - Posted: 11.06.2014

By Christian Jarrett It feels to me like interest in the brain has exploded. I’ve seen huge investments in brain science by the USA and Europe (the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project), I’ve read about the rise in media coverage of neuroscience, and above all, I’ve noticed how journalists and bloggers now often frame stories as being about the brain as opposed to the person. Look at these recent headlines: “Why your brain loves storytelling” (Harvard Business Review); “How Netflix is changing our brains” (Forbes); and “Why your brain wants to help one child in need — but not millions” (NPR). There are hundreds more, and in each case, the headline could be about “you” but the writer chooses to make it about “your brain”. Consider too the emergence of new fields such as neuroleadership, neuroaesthetics and neuro-law. It was only a matter of time before someone announced that we’re in the midst of a neurorevolution. In 2009 Zach Lynch did that, publishing his The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World. Having said all that, I’m conscious that my own perspective is heavily biased. I earn my living writing about neuroscience and psychology. I’m vigilant for all things brain. Maybe the research investment and brain-obsessed media headlines are largely irrelevant to the general public. I looked into this question recently and was surprised by what I found. There’s not a lot of research but that which exists (such as this, on the teen brain) suggests neuroscience has yet to make an impact on most people’s everyday lives. Indeed, I made Myth #20 in my new book Great Myths of the Brain “Neuroscience is transforming human self-understanding”. WIRED.com © 2014 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 20282 - Posted: 11.06.2014

By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website Working antisocial hours can prematurely age the brain and dull intellectual ability, scientists warn. Their study, in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, suggested a decade of shifts aged the brain by more than six years. There was some recovery after people stopped working antisocial shifts, but it took five years to return to normal. Experts say the findings could be important in dementia, as many patients have disrupted sleep. The body's internal clock is designed for us to be active in the day and asleep at night. The damaging effects on the body of working against the body clock, from breast cancer to obesity, are well known. Now a team at the University of Swansea and the University of Toulouse has shown an impact on the mind as well. Three thousand people in France performed tests of memory, speed of thought and wider cognitive ability. The brain naturally declines as we age, but the researchers said working antisocial shifts accelerated the process. Those with more than 10 years of shift work under their belts had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The good news is that when people in the study quit shift work, their brains did recover. Even if it took five years. Dr Philip Tucker, part of the research team in Swansea, told the BBC: "It was quite a substantial decline in brain function, it is likely that when people trying to undertake complex cognitive tasks then they might make more mistakes and slip-ups, maybe one in 100 makes a mistake with a very large consequence, but it's hard to say how big a difference it would make in day-to-day life." BBC © 2014

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 20281 - Posted: 11.05.2014

Kate Baggaley Much of the increase in autism diagnoses in recent decades may be tied to changes in how the condition is reported. Sixty percent of the increase in autism cases in Denmark can be explained by these changes, scientists report November 3 in JAMA Pediatrics. The researchers followed all 677,915 people born in Denmark in 1980 through 1991, monitoring them from birth through the end of 2011. Among children born in this period, diagnoses increased fivefold, until 1 percent of children born in the early 1990s were diagnosed with autism by age 20. During these decades, Denmark experienced two changes in the way autism is reported. In 1994, the criteria physicians rely on to diagnose autism were updated in both the International Classification of Diseases manual used by Denmark and in its American counterpart, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Then in 1995, the Danish Psychiatric Register began reporting diagnoses where doctors had only outpatient contact with children, in addition to cases where autism was diagnosed after children had been kept overnight. The researchers estimated Danish children’s likelihood of being diagnosed with autism before and after the two reporting changes. These changes accounted for 60 percent of the increase in diagnoses. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 20280 - Posted: 11.05.2014

By Amy Robinson Whether you’re walking, talking or contemplating the universe, a minimum of tens of billions of synapses are firing at any given second within your brain. “The weak link in understanding ourselves is really about understanding how our brains generate our minds and how our minds generate our selves,” says MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden. One cubic millimeter in the brain contains over 100,000 neurons connected through a billion synapses computing on a millisecond timescale. To understand how information flows within these circuits, we first need a “brain parts” list of neurons and glia. But such a list is not enough. We’ll also need to chart how cells are connected and to monitor their activity over time both electrically and chemically. Researchers can do this at small scale thanks to a technology developed in the 1970s called patch clamping. Bringing a tiny glass needle very near to a neuron living within a brain allows researchers to perform microsurgery on single neurons, piercing the cell membrane to do things like record the millivolt electrical impulses flowing through it. Patch clamping also facilitates measurement of proteins contained within the cell, revealing characteristic molecules and contributing to our understanding of why one neuron may behave differently than another. Neuroscientists can even inject glowing dyes in order to see the shape of cells. Patch clamping is a technique that has been used in neuroscience for 40 years. Why now does it make an appearance as a novel neuroscience technology? In a word: robots. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 20279 - Posted: 11.05.2014

By Kelly Servick Using data from old clinical trials, two groups of researchers have found a better way to predict how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) progresses in different patients. The winning algorithms—designed by non-ALS experts—outperformed the judgments of a group of ALS clinicians given the same data. The advances could make it easier to test whether new drugs can slow the fatal neurodegenerative disease. The new work was inspired by the so-called ALS Prediction Prize, a joint effort by the ALS-focused nonprofit Prize4Life and Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods, a computational biology project whose sponsors include IBM, Columbia University, and the New York Academy of Sciences. Announced in 2012, the $50,000 award was designed to bring in experts from outside the ALS field to tackle the notoriously unpredictable illness. Liuxia Wang, a data analyst at the marketing company Sentrana in Washington, D.C., was used to helping companies make business decisions based on big data sets, such as information about consumer choices, but says she “didn’t know too much about this life science thing” until she got an unusual query from a client. One of the senior managers she worked with revealed that her son had just been diagnosed with ALS and wondered if Sentrana’s analytics could apply to patient data, too. When Wang set out to investigate, she found the ALS Prediction Prize. The next step, she said, was to learn something about ALS. The disease destroys the neurons that control muscle movement, causing gradual paralysis and eventually killing about half of patients within 3 years of diagnosis. But the speed of its progression varies widely. About 10% of patients live a decade or more after being diagnosed. That makes it hard for doctors to answer patients’ questions about the future, and it’s a big problem for testing new ALS treatments. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 20278 - Posted: 11.04.2014

James Gorman Here is something to keep arachnophobes up at night. The inside of a spider is under pressure, like the air in a balloon, because spiders move by pushing fluid through valves. They are hydraulic. This works well for the spiders, but less so for those who want to study what goes on in the brain of a jumping spider, an aristocrat of arachnids that, according to Ronald R. Hoy, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, is one of the smartest of all invertebrates. If you insert an electrode into the spider’s brain, what’s inside might squirt out, and while that is not the kind of thing that most people want to think about, it is something that the researchers at Cornell had to consider. Dr. Hoy and his colleagues wanted to study jumping spiders because they are very different from most of their kind. They do not wait in a sticky web for lunch to fall into a trap. They search out prey, stalk it and pounce. “They’ve essentially become cats,” Dr. Hoy said. And they do all this with a brain the size of a poppy seed and a visual system that is completely different from that of a mammal: two big eyes dedicated to high-resolution vision and six smaller eyes that pick up motion. Dr. Hoy gathered four graduate students in various disciplines to solve the problem of recording activity in a jumping spider’s brain when it spots something interesting — a feat nobody had accomplished before. In the end, they not only managed to record from the brain, but discovered that one neuron seemed to be integrating the information from the spider’s two independent sets of eyes, a computation that might be expected to involve a network of brain cells. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Evolution
Link ID: 20277 - Posted: 11.04.2014

|By Sandra Upson Jan Scheuermann is not your average experimental subject. Diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration, she is only able to move her head and neck. The paralysis, which began creeping over her muscles in 1996, has been devastating in many ways. Yet two years ago she seized an opportunity to turn her personal liability into an extraordinary asset for neuroscience. In 2012 Scheuermann elected to undergo brain surgery to implant two arrays of electrodes on her motor cortex, a band of tissue on the surface of the brain. She did so as a volunteer in a multi-year study at the University of Pittsburgh to develop a better brain-computer interface. When she visits the lab, researchers hook up her brain to a robotic arm and hand, which she practices moving using her thoughts alone. The goal is to eventually allow other paralyzed individuals to regain function by wiring up their brains directly to a computer or prosthetic limb. The electrodes in her head record the firing patterns of about 150 of her neurons. Specific patterns of neuronal activity encode her desire to perform different movements, such as swinging the arm to the left or clasping the fingers around a cup. Two thick cables relay the data from her neurons to a computer, where software can identify Scheuermann’s intentions. The computer can then issue appropriate commands to move the robotic limb. On a typical workday, Jan Scheuermann arrives at the university around 9:15 am. Using her chin, she maneuvers her electric wheelchair into a research lab headed by neuroscientist Andrew Schwartz and settles in for a day of work. Scientific American Mind spoke to Scheuermann to learn more about her experience as a self-proclaimed “guinea pig extraordinaire.” © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 20276 - Posted: 11.04.2014