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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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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How Much of Your Memory Is True?

These recent insights into memory are part of a larger about-face in neuroscience research. Until recently, long-term memories were thought to be physically etched into our brain, permanent and unchanging. Now it is becoming clear that memories are surprisingly vulnerable and highly dynamic. In the lab they can be flicked on or dimmed with a simple dose of drugs. “For a hundred years, people thought memory was wired into the brain,” Nader says. “Instead, we find it can be rewired—you can add false information to it, make it stronger, make it weaker, and possibly even make it disappear.” Nader and Brunet are not the only ones to make this observation. Other scientists probing different parts of the brain’s memory machinery are similarly finding that memory is inherently flexible.

By Kathleen McGowan (Discover Magazine)

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The Brain Adapts in a Blink to Compensate for Missing Information

The human brain has long been known to perceive things that aren’t there—from phantom limbs to patterns in chaos. But a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) shows for the first time that it is surprisingly quick to bend reality when normal perception is disrupted. The results were published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience.

By Katherine Harmon (Scientific American)

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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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Mirroring Behavior – How mirror neurons let us interact with others

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

These “mirror neurons”, as Rizzolatti later dubbed them, were hypothesized to constitute a brain system responsible for our ability to understand the actions of others. We know about our world because we’ve interacted with it and only by simulating this interaction in our heads can we comprehend the behaviour of someone else.

In 1992 Rizzolatti published a short report in a minor neuroscience journal describing his discovery of mirror neurons. The paper was largely ignored. Then, almost four years later, he published a more detailed account of the finding in the journal Brain that launched a torrent of research – more than 300 papers in the past ten years – into mirror neurons and their properties. As he explained to The New York Times in an interview, “It took us several years to believe what we were seeing.”

Since Rizzolatti’s 1996 paper, studies in primates and humans support the idea that mirror neurons help us understand observed behaviour. One primate study found that mirror neurons were activated simply by the sound of an action, like the ripping of paper, while another found that the mental representation of actions was enough to cause mirror neuron firing. These are important results because they demonstrate a mirror neuron response to the meaning of an action and not just the observation of one.

By Daniel Lametti (Scientific American)

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People Who Wear Rose-colored Glasses See More, Study Shows

“Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see,” says Adam Anderson, a U of T professor of psychology. “Specifically our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision.” The study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.

By Science Daily

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Meditation: Changing the way we focus our attention.

Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)

The Dalai Lama’s interest in neuroscience has been reciprocated by at least some members of the neuroscience community. Reasoning that studying the brains of people who meditate might lead to novel insights about the human brain, investigations of long-term meditators has been fertile ground for scientific investigation, with some of the more rigorous work emerging from Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.

When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention.

By Peter B. Reiner (Scientific American)

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Brain Mapping Time Reduced From Years To A Few Months With New Technology

Mapping the billions of connections in the brain is a grand challenge in neuroscience. The current method for mapping interconnected brain cells involves the use of room-size microscopes known as transmission electron microscopes (TEMs). Until now the process of mapping even small areas of the brain using these massive machines would have required several decades.

By Science Daily

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Reading Your Mind

Interesting Video by 60 minutes:

Neuroscience has learned much about the brain’s activity and its link to certain thoughts. As Lesley Stahl reports, it may now be possible, on a basic level, to read a person’s mind.

By CBS News Video

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How Our Brains are Wired for Belief

Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. In observing Buddhist monks as they meditate, Franciscan nuns as they pray and Pentecostals as they speak in tongues, Dr. Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that measurable brain activity matches up with the religious experiences described by worshippers.

By The Pew Forum Transcripts

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The Mind and Materialist Superstition

Materialists have taken note of the growing efforts by non-materialist neuroscientists to point out the deep problems with the inference that the brain is entirely the cause of the mind. Materialist neuroscience, like materialist evolutionary biology, is a vacuous orthodoxy, and its proponents resent threats to their dogma. Darwinian explanations for functional biological complexity are nonsense, but some familiarity with the relevant science is necessary to understand that it is nonsense. Materialist explanations for the mind are transparent nonsense.

Consider the six characteristics of the mind, generally accepted by materialist and non-materialist scientists and philosophers. Each of the six poses enormous problems for a materialistic explanation.

By Michael Egnor (Evolution News & Views)

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Brain-only Computer Interfaces Becoming Reality

My jaw hit the floor tonight watching a 60 Minutes segment on the emerging neuroscience of brain-only computer interfaces. In the clip (included in full below), see how a completely paralyzed man, who could otherwise only communicate by moving his eyes, uses his mind to type out thoughts on a computer screen.

By Gina Trapani (Lifehacker)

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Dial H for Happiness: How Neuroengineering May Change Your Brain

This is the second of two parts on the convergence of engineering and neuroscience.  Part One, Rewiring the Brain, examines attempts to control the brain using surgically implanted optical switches.

Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick may have best anticipated neuroengineering in his most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the movie Blade Runner. The main character and his wife get up in the morning and select their moods on what Dick called a Penfield mood organ.

By Quinn Norton (Wired)

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Attention, Memory and the Mind: A Synergy of Psychological, Neuroscientific, and Contemplative Perspectives

Beginning in the twentieth century, science has become the dominant paradigm for understanding the natural world by way of objective, quantitative measurements, using the instruments of technology. The integration of scientific knowledge and technology has vastly contributed to our understanding of the physical world and to improving the human standard of living. Furthermore, over a much longer time period spanning the past 2,500 years, Buddhism has emerged in multiple cultures throughout Asia as the dominant paradigm for understanding the natural world by way of subjective, qualitative observations by way of highly sophisticated meditative training.

By (Mind & Life Institute)

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Scientists extract images directly from brain

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.

By Pink Tentacle

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