In September, 2006, I described my “new brain/mind theory” here and received some challenging criticism from Eric Thomson and Mike S. (see below). To meet these challenges, I prepared a reduced model discussed in a web page linked to a paper in .pdf form. Since my approach is based on little-known thermodynamics, I have also written about mechanical metaphors that may be helpful in explaining my ideas.
HOW DOES THE BRAIN CONTROL BEHAVIOR?
HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY EMULATE BIOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE?
The conference is aimed at researchers and students of computational neuroscience, cognitive science, neural networks, neuromorphic engineering, and artificial intelligence. It includes invited lectures and contributed lectures and posters by experts on the biology and technology of how the brain and other intelligent systems adapt to a changing world. The conference is particularly interested in exploring how the brain and biologically-inspired algorithms and systems in engineering and technology can learn. Single-track oral and poster sessions enable all presented work to be highly visible. Three-hour poster sessions with no conflicting events will be held on two of the conference days. Posters will be up all day, and can also be viewed during breaks in the talk schedule.
ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS
May 16 – 19, 2007
Boston University
677 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02215 USA
http://www.cns.bu.edu/meetings/
Sponsored by the Boston University
Center for Adaptive Systems and
Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (http://www.cns.bu.edu/)
with financial support from the National Science Foundation (http://cns.bu.edu/CELEST/)
Is science just about facts, or are theories and conceptualizations important too? Should we worry about having good theories, or do the facts pretty much give us everything we need to know. This article, entitled “Facts, concepts, and theories: The shape of psychology’s epistemic triangle“, discusses this issue for the field of Psychology, though its contents are also applicable to Neuroscience and AI.
The October 6th issue of Science is a special issue devoted to computational neuroscience. From the introduction to the special issue:
Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behavior of the nervous system. Simulations are essential because the present experimental systems are too complex to allow collection of all the data. Modeling has become so powerful these days that there is no longer a one-way flow of scientific information. There is considerable intellectual exchange between modelers and experimentalists. The results produced in the simulation lab often lead to testable predictions and thus challenge other researchers to design new experiments or reanalyze their data as they try to confirm or falsify the hypotheses put forward. For this issue of Science, we invited leading computational neuroscientists, each of whom works at a different organizational level, to review the latest attempts of mathematical and computational modeling and to give us an outlook on what the future might hold in store.
Of particular interest is a review article by Randall O’Reilly on biologically based computational models. He focuses on models of the pre-frontal cortex.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a popular technology for stimulating human cortical neurons, due to its safety, noninvasiveness, and efficacy. A TMS device is just a little coil of wire, through which 10,000 Amps of current is cranked during a period of only a few hundred microseconds; the resultant rapidly-changing magnetic field induces eddy currents in the brain. Depending on the protocol used, TMS can drive/inhibit a region of cortex corresponding to roughly a cubic centimeter or two, and is being explored for the treatment of depression, the reduction of auditory hallucinations during schizophrenia, and the alleviation of tinnitus and migraines. Thousands of papers on medicine and psychology have been written using this tool.
Yet the device itself is expensive and rare — they can run from $20,000 to $50,000 or even more, despite the fact that they are, in essence, a coil, a switch, a bank of capacitors, and a power supply. Much of the art lies in making the devices safe and fail-proof. Is it possible to hack/engineer a system that is safe, fault-tolerant, efficacious, and inexpensive? And furthermore, can we facilitate a community that will devise such devices, and share information about protocols and approaches to brain hacking?
This past August at Foo Camp, a hackers’ conference in Northern California, a group of people got together and set out to do just that. We are designing a safe, noninvasive, modular, and “open source” brain stimulator that will open up the field of circuit modulation to a wider audience. Members of the group include therapists and mental health professionals, engineers, programmers, and others interested in either the development of such devices, or the sharing of information on this front. Key to the design is safety — we want to make sure that the devices we create are as safe as devices on the market. Also, all the information is released under the Creative Commons “Attribution and Sharealike” license. This is a new model for “open source” medical device development — which may move it beyond the domain of simply creating “cool toys,” and to creating real devices.
You can find out more information, or contribute to the project, or learn from the project, at
http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/
-Ed
My website “Quad Nets: Device Models of Brains” is online at www.quadnets.com.
(link)
“Quad Nets” proposes a new kind of “artificial intelligence” that uses devices other than computers. Chiefly presented through Images, the Quad Net approach integrates physics, neuroscience and psychology in primal forms, initially rudimentary, but suitable for unlimited development in size and complexity.
I am an amateur and have privately worked in these areas for many years. Unfortunately, I have not found a means of communication through established channels. I hope that the readers of this blog will provide needed critical review. Thanks to the “neurodudes” for making this medium available.
Bob Kovsky (rlk “at” sonic.net)
In the provocative-hypothesis-of-the-week department:
Kevin Lafferty, a parasitologist, has put forth the idea that a fairly ubiquitous parasite (infecting O(10%) of Americans, and up to 2/3 of people in places like Brazil) is responsible for some of the diversity of human culures (1). The parasite uses common housecats to increase its transmission to the next host in the life cycle, and has a subtle effect on human personality, with some studies claiming that it even causes neuroticism, and even schizophrenia. (One clinical report (2) claims that “subjects with latent toxoplasmosis had higher intelligence [and] lower guilt proneness.” Hmm!)
Anyway, Lafferty noted that toxoplasmosis varies in prevalence from world region to world region, and then tries to draw correlates between these prevalences and local cultures:
“Drivers of the geographical variation in the prevalence of this parasite include the effects of climate on the persistence of infectious stages in soil, the cultural practices of food preparation and cats as pets. Some variation in culture, therefore, may ultimately be related to how climate affects the distribution of T. gondii, though the results only explain a fraction of the variation in two of the four cultural dimensions, suggesting that if T. gondii does influence human culture, it is only one among many factors.”
I wonder how one could test this hypothesis? Look for recent immigrants from one culture to another, who have lower Toxoplasmosis incidence? (Preferably finding populations that go in opposite directions, as a control.) Track culture change vs. migration vs. climate change?
Unlikely, perhaps. But nice that people are still thinking big 
– Ed
(1) Lafferty, K
Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3641
Picked up by the popular press here
(2) Flegr J, Havlicek J.
Changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis.
Folia Parasitol (Praha). 1999;46(1):22-8.
A New Psychology resource, community built by psychologists and trainees, to unify the body of psychology information in one place:
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Check it out, and if it interests you, please contribute, or review it on your blog.
Tom Michael, Mostly Zen - site admin
This past May, the Almaden Research center, part of IBM research, invited some provocative speakers on the topic of “Cognitive Computing” to come and speak. Since IBM recently invested a lot of money into understanding the brain with the Blue Brain project, it seems like this meeting was a way to figure out the next step along this path.
Powerpoint presentations and videos of the event are available online.
From the synopsis:
The 2006 Almaden Institute will focus on the theme of “Cognitive Computing” and will examine scientific and technological issues around the quest to understand how the human brain works. We will examine approaches to understanding cognition that unify neurological, biological, psychological, mathematical, computational, and information-theoretic insights. We focus on the search for global, top-down theories of cognition that are consistent with known bottom-up, neurobiological facts and serve to explain a broad range of observed cognitive phenomena. The ultimate goal is to understand how and when can we mechanize cognition.
Confirmed speakers include Toby Berger (Cornell), Gerald Edelman (The Neurosciences Institute), Joaquin Fuster (UCLA), Jeff Hawkins (Palm/Numenta), Robert Hecht-Nielsen (UCSD), Christof Koch (CalTech), Henry Markram (EPFL/BlueBrain), V. S. Ramachandran (UCSD), John Searle (UC Berkeley) and Leslie Valiant (Harvard). Confirmed panelists include: James Albus (NIST), Theodore Berger (USC), Kwabena Boahen (Stanford), Ralph Linsker (IBM), and Jerry Swartz (The Swartz Foundation).
Cool stuff:
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive Science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.