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?

Finally, they’ve figured out something that neural systems have capitalized on for a while: Using all 3 dimensions. Check it out:

NYT article on Stuart Parkin and racetrack memory
IBM Almaden page on racetrack memory

And a nice semi-technical discussion from EE Times on current 2D RAM and how racetrack memory takes advantage of 3 dimensions. A key concept here (and an old one, see bubble memory below) is “massless motion”: Applying a current to a tape moves the magnetic domains along in a similar manner to mechanically moving the tape.

On the macro scale, a similar type of memory called bubble memory was available up to the early 1980s when it was replaced with hard disks. Seems like high speed (pushing the correct magnetic portion of the nanowire to the read head) and doing so without excessive current are what really make this a viable technology now.

“It sounds like a science-fiction version of stupid pet tricks: by toggling a light switch, neuroscientists can set fruit flies a-leaping and mice a-twirling and stop worms in their squiggling tracks. But such feats, unveiled in the past two years, are proof that a new generation of genetic and optical technology can give researchers unprecedented power to turn on and off targeted sets of cells in the brain, and to do so by remote control…”

Reviews the use of photosensitive proteins in neuroscience and even gives a shout-out to Ed Boyden, of Stanford and MIT fame…

– Davie (who had the same advisor as Ed for about a day and is therefore 0.01% more famous by association)

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.

Braintool.org is a project, recently launched by Dejan Vucinic at the Salk Institute, which acts as a Wiki for the basic-science neural tools field. I highly encourage people to contribute, and to make use of, the information. Topics of note include:

• Tissue preparation and surgery
• Labeling cells
• Extracellular electrode recording
• Stimulation and remote control of neurons
• Electroencephalography (EEG)
• Optical microscopy
• Optical functional imaging
• Electron microscopy
• Functional magnetic imaging (fMRI)

In its own words, Braintool “contains hands-on advice, contributed by experts, for the practicing experimental neuroscientist. Here you will find information that often gets buried into obscure methods journals or into the invisible Supplementary Materials section of published articles.” Let’s face it — there is almost an infinite amount of work to do on the brain, and if we don’t leverage our technological innovations towards great progress, we are never going to understand the whole thing. Start accelerating neuroscience now!

–Ed

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

Gerstner‘s group in Lausanne, Switzerland has announced a competition to predict the electrical behavior of individual neurons in two respects:

1) predict the timing of every spike that a neuron emits with a precision of 2ms.

2) predict the subthreshold membrane potential with a precision of 2mV for arbitrary input.

Details on the competition, including the dataset (released 16 March 2007), are here.

Note that the first prize winner receives:

- 4 nights of hotel in Lausanne at the Lake Geneva, June 23-27.
- Free participation in the Quantitative Neuron Modeling workshop June 25/26
- 35-minute-slot for talk as an Invited Speaker in the workshop.

get coding.

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.

Ed strikes again!
Two-Color, Bi-Directional Optical Voltage Control of Genetically-Targeted Neurons

Having found a powerful method for activating neurons with blue light in the protein Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) [1], we sought to augment the toolbox by finding a single-component system capable of mediating light-elicited neuronal inhibition. We identified a powerful tool, the mammalian codon-optimized version of the light-driven chloride pump halorhodopsin, from the archaebacterium Natronobacterium pharaonis (here abbreviated Halo) [2].

Some surprising and important news from Nature Biotechnology about a common technique in cellular imagining, fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. Specifically, it looks like ATP/Mg can significantly alter the FRET signal, which has commonly been used for looking at Ca, voltage, and various other binding interactions in neurons:

Given these findings, we predict that fluctuations in free or Mg2+-bound ATP will affect the signal output of most—if not all—CFP-YFP–based FRET indicators.

(more…)