Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain,”
says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at
IBM Almaden Research Center.

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain’s abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

By Priya Ganapati (Wired: Gadget Lab)

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Are we on the brink of creating a computer with a human brain?

There are only a handful of scientific revolutions that would really change the world. An immortality pill would be one. A time machine would be another.

Faster-than-light travel, allowing the stars to be explored in a human lifetime, would be on the shortlist, too.

To my mind, however, the creation of an artificial mind would probably trump all of these – a development that would throw up an array of bewildering and complex moral and philosophical quandaries. Amazingly, it might also be within reach.

By Michael Hanlon (Mail Online)

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Stanford Issues Findings from Cognitive and Brain Experts Urging Consumer Caution…

Stanford Issues Findings from Cognitive and Brain Experts Urging Consumer Caution on Memory Fitness Products.

“Fear of memory loss, mental impairment and Alzheimer’s disease lead many consumers to search for products — from supplements to software — that claim to ward off such ailments,” Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, said. “Such products are becoming more prolific, but this burgeoning industry is completely unregulated and the claims can
range from reasonable though untested, to blatantly false. It is important for consumers to proceed with caution before buying into many of these product claims. There is no magic bullet solution for cognitive decline.”

By Stanford Center on Longevity (Reuters)

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Ray Kurzweil about Singularity and Technology

The Singularity Summit 2009

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato Online)

The Singularity Summit is the premier dialog on the Singularity.

The first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress. It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

Since 2006, the scope of this dialog has expanded dramatically. In 2008, the Singularity entered mainstream consideration. IEEE Spectrum, a sober and mainstream technology publication, issued a special report on the Singularity, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner remarked that “we’re making steady progress toward the Singularity” during his keynote to 2,000 people at the Intel Developer Forum. What was once a relatively unknown concept is now being discussed in corporate board rooms.

We invite you to join our extraordinary group of visionaries in business, science, technology, design, and the arts, as our community explores this exciting topic. Your participation offers a world of powerful ideas, a unique networking opportunity, and access to an exclusive directory of your peers.

We hope you will join us October 3rd.

Find out more about the Summit here

Psychopaths have faulty brain connections, scientists find

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato Online)

Psychopaths who kill and rape have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found.

In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had “potholes,” while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.

By Kate Kelland (Reuters)

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Body Swap Illusion Tricks Mind

Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much.

Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

By Karl Ritter (Discovery News)

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Fox News Michio Kaku Mind Over Matter

Artificial Neural Networks

Defining intelligence is tough. There is no absolute criterion for measuring intelligence. What makes the task more complex is that it is not known if there is a form of ‘intelligence’ that can solve all types of problems, or do we need different types of intelligence for different fields.

By Hassam (Hubpages)

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Video Player Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate

Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)

By MIT World

Watch the Video Here

Perceiving Touch And Your Self Outside Of Your Body

When you feel you are being touched, usually someone or something is physically touching you and you perceive that your “self” is located in the same place as your body. Neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a “virtual” body is seen. These findings will provide new avenues for the animation of virtual worlds and machines.

By Science Daily

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Brain Develops Motor Memory For Prosthetics

“Practice makes perfect” is the maxim drummed into students struggling to learn a new motor skill – be it riding a bike or developing a killer backhand in tennis. Stunning new research now reveals that the brain can also achieve this motor memory with a prosthetic device, providing hope that physically disabled people can one day master control of artificial limbs with greater ease.

By Science Daily

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Making a computer that works like the brain

Humans 2.0: Replacing the Mind and Body

When President Barack Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday that innovation would be a key to the future of the nation, he probably was not thinking specifically of artificial brains or replacement eyeballs.

But other researchers already have such goals in mind and are well on their way to building Humans 2.0, the real-life Steve Austin of the “Six Million Dollar Man.”

Recent breakthroughs in bionics and lab-grown body parts — along with news last month that a Swiss research team aims to recreate the intricacies of the human brain within a decade — show science is rapidly creating many of the parts needed to build a fully functional human almost from scratch.

While the ultimate goal remains years if not decades away, and some aspects may be ethically questionable, the work is already helping people live more bearable and productive lives.

By Heather Whipps and Robert Roy Britt (Live Science)

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Artificial brain ‘10 years away’

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.

By Jonathan Fildes (BBC News)

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Brain Boosters

Daryl Kipke is showing off his company’s latest prototype, a state-of-the-art electronic chip. It’s not the sort likely to end up powering your iPod, but it does produce a beat you won’t be able to get out of your head—because this device is designed to be surgically implanted deep in your brain, where the chip will deliver electric signals to specific clusters of cells. Kipke’s firm, NeuroNexus Technologies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is developing and testing the device to deliver electric pulses that can relieve some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. “Deep-brain stimulation has been poorly understood,” says Kipke, who is also a University of Michigan neuroscientist. “But with this technology we can improve neuron targeting and tuning.”

By David H. Freedman (Newsweek)

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Can Brain Scans Read Your Mind?

Can neuroscience read people’s minds? Some researchers, and some new businesses, are banking on a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal hidden thoughts, such as lies, truths or deep desires.

New research by neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University provides evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to determine what a person is thinking. At the same time, the research suggests that highly accurate “mind reading” using fMRI is still far from reality. The research is scheduled to be published in the October 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science.

By Lockergnome

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Our Metallic Reflection: Considering Future Human-android Interactions

Everyday human interaction is not what you would call perfect, so what if there was a third party added to the mix – like a metallic version of us? In a new article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologist Neal J. Roese and computer scientist Eyal Amir from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigate what human-android interactions may be like 50 years into the future.

By Science Daily

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Controlling video games with your mind

Mind over matter as scientists use brainpower to make wishes come true

From the Hollywood film Firefox to the television show Heroes, science fiction writers have always dreamt of the day when humans could control machines with the power of thought alone.

Now British scientists are turning the vision into reality with a device that allows objects to be manipulated with brain waves.

The prototype, developed at Essex University, can already be used to play simple computer games. By imagining a movement, the wearer of the hat-shaped device can tell the computer to move an object around a screen or a robot around a room.

The researchers hope their technology will eventually allow people to move wheelchairs and drive cars with their thoughts.

By Richard Gray (Telegraph.co.uk)

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Toyota’s mind-controlled wheelchair boast fastest brainwave analysis yet

Mind-controlled wheelchairs are becoming all the rage these days, but before you start letting your thoughts wander elsewhere, this latest from researchers at the Brain Science Institute (BSI) — Toyota Collaboration Center have what they claim is a system that’ll control the ride using brain waves analyzed every 125 milliseconds, which it boasts bests the competition by several seconds.

By Ross Miller (engaget)

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Playing computer games improves brain power of older adults, claim scientists.

Psychologists discovered that playing video games exercised the mind and improved memory and alertness.

It also reversed “cognitive” decline making the brain more agile, allowing it to carry out and switch between tasks more quickly.

Previous studies have shown that elderly brains improve during the playing of video games but this is the first to prove that the benefits remain for weeks afterwards and can transfer to everyday tasks.

By Richard Alleyne (Telegraph.co.uk)

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Artificial Intelligence–Getting Computers to Think

You’re trying to get a computer to act like a person but you don’t really know what a person is. If you want to imitate something the logical first step is to understand what you’re trying to imitate. The point most scientists miss is there is a spirit soul within the body controlling it.

The body can be compared to the computer as both are machines. Both machines (the body and the computer) require intelligent direction from a spiritual living entity to function properly. I can think, I can reason, I can analyze the data and come to logical conclusions. Even if I program this into the computer, the computer just plays back my instructions. It’s something like recording your voice with a tape recorder then playing it back and claiming the tape recorder is talking.

By Madhudvisa Dasa (Krishna.org)

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David Meyer and Tendzin Choegyal: Can computers have consciousness?

Many people are questioning today what consciousness really is. How will this concept be defined? Watch this interesting video that highlights some of the issues:

A robot that can cry?

A thinking cap that can unlock hidden genius

The device works by switching on and off certain sections of the brain and so unlocking its hidden potential, reported The Daily Telegraph newspaper in London.

The hairnet-like cap uses tiny magnetic pulses to change the way the brain works and has led to improved artistic ability, mathematical ability and proof-reading skills.

By (The Australian)

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Assessing the effects of television on young children

Christakis realized that the jumpy images on the screen were engaging the child’s ‘orienting response’, a basic attentional reflex that directs the senses towards a sudden change in the environment. He wondered about the long-term effect of this on a brain that was at such a sensitive developmental stage. Could it alter the brain to ‘expect’ overstimulation, so that ordinary reality would thereafter seem dull by comparison? And could such a mechanism help to explain the ongoing tsunami of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, whose rise had roughly coincided with the dramatic increase in media consumption in Western societies?

By Jim Schnabel (Nature News)

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Brain-computer interface, developed at Brown, begins new clinical trial

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — BrainGate, an investigational technology being developed to detect brain signals and to allow people with paralysis to use those signals to control assistive devices, is about to begin a second, larger clinical trial. The system is based on neuroscience, engineering and computer science research at Brown University.

The BrainGate2 pilot clinical trial is taking place at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), in close collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MGH and Brown University. The study has been approved by the MGH Institutional Review Board to begin recruiting participants. The trial extends prior safety and feasibility research of the BrainGate Neural Interface System, which consists of an implanted baby aspirin-size brain sensor that reads brain signals and computer technology that interprets these signals. The BrainGate Neural System may allow people with paralysis to control assistive devices.

By Mark Hollmer (Brown University)

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Can a machine change your mind?

There are in fact even more extreme examples than those in the Times article of how neuro-science and social science increasingly overlap. Alan Sanfey, of the Neural Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona, for example, describes a neuro-economic analysis of an Ultimatum Game in which one person is given the power over another to make an offer to split £100. If the other rejects the offer, no one gets anything. So far so familiar — to other behavioural economics experiments that study the norms of fairness. One neuro-twist to the story, though, is that experimenters can make subjects more or less willing to accept unfair offers by subjecting their brains to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), non-invasive and painless stimulation of the brain.

By Jane O’Grady (Open Democracy)

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Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology: Hacking the Mind

Carole Smith describes claims that neuroscientists are developing brain scans that can read people’s intentions in the absence of serious discussions about the ethical issues this raises, despite the fact that the research has been backed by government in the UK and US.

‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation”.

“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall”, the scientists were reported as saying.

By Carole Smith (globalresearch.ca)

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