neurodudes

Emotiv is a company trying to do a neuro (EEG) interface to game platforms.

Emotiv Home

Seems ambitious. Do EEG interfaces have a fast enough information transfer rate (bits/sec) for gaming? Maybe it’s not necessary if the game is just detecting your “mood” in conjunction with a standard keypad controller but seems to me you’d want to try and boost bit rates (as several EEG groups, like this one at Fraunhofer, are doing) as much as possible.

Anyone used this device?

The concept that the brain holds maps of the surface of the body in the primary sensory and motor cortex is a fascinating but well known fact to the field of neuroscience since the early work of Wilder Penfield. What is less broadly appreciated is the concept of “peripersonal space”. A new book by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee describes peripersonal space in the following way:

The maps that encode your physical body are connected directly, immediately, personally to a map of every point in that space and also map out your potential to perform actions in that space. Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. [...] Your brain also faithfully maps the space beyond your body when you enter it using tools. Take hold of a long stick and tap it on the ground. As far as your brain is concerned, your hand now extends to the tip of that stick. [...] Moreover, this annexed peripersonal space is not static, like an aura. It is elastic. [...] It morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, wear skis or scuba gear, or wield any tool. [...] When you eat with a knife and fork, your peripersonal space grows to envelop them. Brain cells that normally represent space no farther out than your fingertips expand their fields of awareness outward, along the length of each utensil, making them part of you.

What I appreciate about this, besides the stretchy comic book characters that it makes me think about, is that it provides a powerful perspective to begin piecing together a mass of disparate neuroscience data, which the Blakeslee’s capitalize on.

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Happy Labor Day (US)! Topping the NYT most popular articles list right now is an interesting article about a new schizophrenia treatment that targets certain glutamate receptors unlike previous dopaminergic drugs. The drug, which is being developed by Eli Lilly, is partially due to this interesting observation:

For decades, psychiatrists have known that users of PCP, a street drug sometimes called angel dust, have symptoms nearly identical to those of people with schizophrenia. By the 1980s, scientists had discovered that PCP blocked brain receptors that are triggered by an amino acid called glutamate. This led some companies and scientists to study ways to stimulate glutamate receptors as a treatment for schizophrenia.

But the brain has many different kinds of glutamate receptors, and figuring out how to stimulate or block them in medically beneficial ways has proved complicated. Instead of focusing on the receptors blocked by PCP, Dr. Schoepp concentrated on modulating the action of glutamate receptors in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for personality and learning.

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Recently, I was pointed to this article in the WSJ (”A Pentagon Agency Is Looking at Brains — And Raising Eyebrows“) by Sharon Begley. It touches on some noninvasive recording techniques for assessing affective state and cognitive enhancers like ampakine CX717 (previously mentioned on Neurodudes here and here).

It was the very last paragraph that caught my eye:

Ever since the atomic bomb, physicists have known that their work has potential military uses, and have spoken up about it. But on the morality of sending orders directly to the brain (of a soldier, employee, child, prisoner …), or of devices that read thoughts and intentions from afar, neuroscientists have been strangely silent. The time to speak up is before the genie is out of the bottle.

Whoa! To me, the physicists who spoke out early on against nuclear proliferation seemed (and still seem) both very courageous and prescient in their ideas. Are we neuroscientists dropping the ball? I would love to start a discussion on this subject and to hear your responses (both from neuro people and others) in the comments below.

I’ll start: I personally don’t think the arena of neural enhancement/intrusion (mind reading, mind control, cognitive enhancement, etc.) is comparable to the sheer destructive power of nuclear weapons. I do see in the near future the unfortunate potential for abuse of neurotechnology and violation of personal freedoms, but the threat does not seem as horrifying or deadly. Still, if neurotechnology allows governments greater control over their citizens, it seems reasonable that scientists who enable such technologies should intervene. Perhaps it is time for a neural bill of rights, which, similar to the freedoms granted by the US Bill of Rights, will clearly state what aspects of a person’s mental state or capacity cannot be infringed upon without permission from that person. Thoughts?

There’s a nice NRN review on the many recent papers on therapeutic use of transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Is there a future for therapeutic use of transcranial magnetic stimulation?

The past year has seen the publication of a remarkable number of papers about the potential therapeutic effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in conditions ranging from cocaine addiction to stroke and depression. Are we witnessing the discovery of a miraculous cure-all or will this bubble burst like the magnetotherapies of the Victorian era1? We argue below that there is good evidence that rTMS can produce after-effects on the brain, and that these translate into effects on simple behaviours. However, the rationale for applying the same methods to treat disease is in many cases unclear.

The MIT Media Lab is holding a conference on May 9th, “Human 2.0: New Minds, New Bodies, New Identites” which will launch a number of new initiatives centered around the goal of inventing a better future via direct engineering of the human. Amongst these things will be the initiation of the MIT Center for Human Augmentation, and the launch of a number of novel applied Neurotechnology Projects.

Guest speakers on May 9th will include MIT professors (Roz Picard, Hugh Herr, myself, etc.) and many acclaimed speakers such as Oliver Sacks and John Donoghue. Registration may be close to being full, but it will be webcast.

More information at:
http://h20.media.mit.edu

- Ed

This wired article describes the “feelSpace belt”; a belt with 13 vibrator pads that detects the Earth’s magnetic field and communicates its direction to the wearer by making the pad facing in that direction vibrate.

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This week’s Nature has quite a few additional halorhodopsin articles for photochannel fans.

Halorhodopsin article from Deisseroth’s lab:
Multimodal fast optical interrogation of neural circuitry [News & Views]

Also, there is an intriguing article on both the general excitement in the neuroscience community with this new technology and a possible intellectual property dispute over it.

Interview with Ted Berger of USC on their hippocampal prosthetic project in Popular Science magazine

To summarize the most interesting info from the interview:

Berger’s team is trying to make a hippocampal prosthesis (a chip that could be implanted in the hippocampus and help people with damaged hippocampuses). (we’ve mentioned Berger’s team’s efforts before).

He admits that he doesn’t understand how the hippocampus functions in memory, but argues that you may be able to make a prosthesis without this understanding: “A repairman doesn’t need to understand music to fix your broken CD player.”

The first crucial test will be done later this year by Sam Deadwyler at Wake Forest. He will implant the chips in rats, deactivate their hippocampuses with drugs, and see if the prosthetic helps.

OpenViBE is an open source software environment “enclosing novel and efficient techniques for Brain-Computer Interfaces, Neurofeedback and Virtual Reality”. I haven’t downloaded and run it, but it looks like it takes EEG data and renders a 3D image of activity in your brain so that you can use this for neurofeedback. Could be fun in conjunction with the build-your-own-EEG projects that we mentioned recently here.

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