neurodudes

I’ve only skimmed this article by Ranganathan, but I find it notable because of the discussion of memory-oriented computing, in which processors are colocated with storage (he uses the word “nanostores”, which additionally implies that the memory is nonvolatile). One of the most important distinctions between neural architecture and present-day computing architecture is that brains appear to be built out of computing elements that do both processing and memory storage, whereas present-day computers have separate memory and CPU components (this separation is a key feature of what is called the “von Neumann” architecture).

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This study claims that glucose metabolism in the brain goes up near a cellphone antenna. At first blush this may appear to conflict with other studies that claim that cellphones don’t cause cancer, but this can be resolved by supposing that cell phones don’t cause cancer, but affect the brain in other ways. As Volkow notes at the end of the Nytimes article, this may lead to the discovery of a mechanism for brain stimulation. Right now they don’t know what the mechanism is by which the electromagnetic field is causing the glucose metabolism. If neuronal firing is being altered, and if the bandwidth turns out to be sufficiently high (i.e. if the stimulation can be made sufficiently precise), this could eventually lead to a wireless brain-machine interface/neural prosthetic.

Nora D. Volkow, Dardo Tomasi, Gene-Jack Wang, Paul Vaska, Joanna S. Fowler, Frank Telang, Dave Alexoff, Jean Logan, Christopher Wong. Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism. JAMA. 2011;305(8):808-813.

Summary in NYtimes: Cellphone Use Tied to Brain Changes

A mashup is a lightweight (web) application that offers new functionality by combining, aggregating and transforming resources and services available on the web. The AI mashup challenge accepts and awards “intelligent” mashups that use AI technology

The deadline is April 1, 2011.

Awards

• € 1750 sponsored by Elsevier
• Speech outfit from Linguatec
• 10 O’Reilly e-books
• 2 x up to 5 mashup books from Addison-Wesley

http://sites.google.com/a/fh-hannover.de/aimashup11/

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Cognitive Atlas, a machine-readable ontology and semantic database of assertions about cognitive studies, with bibliographic links and brain area localization.

Quartzy is a webapp for collaborative reagent inventory and lab protocol management.

Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building (botjunkie.com via hackernews)

“activating synapses in a centrifugal sequence (outward from the soma) caused a different [lesser] [cortical pyramidal] neuronal response than activating the synapses in a centripetal (inward) sequence”

summary:
Alain Destexhe. Dendrites Do It in Sequences (24 September 2010)
Science 329 (5999), 1611.

article:

Tiago Branco, Beverley A. Clark, and Michael Häusser. Dendritic Discrimination of Temporal Input Sequences in Cortical Neurons (24 September 2010)
Science 329 (5999), 1671.

Imagine there are two referees who have different opinions about where a ball landed, in particular whether it went over some line. How can they cooperate to make a better decision than either one could individually?

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(from 2003) Jaron Lanier talks about the “phenotropic” programme, which consists of trying to design software systems that uses pattern recognition, rather than protocols, for communication between components of the system.

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Guillaume Dumas, Jacqueline Nadel, Robert Soussignan, Jacques Martinerie, Line Garnero. PLoS ONE: Inter-Brain Synchronization during Social Interaction.

Ulman Lindenberger, Shu-Chen Li, Walter Gruber and Viktor Müller. Brains swinging in concert: cortical phase synchronization while playing guitar

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