http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=technology
Detects subthreshold electrical activity from laryngeal muscles and attempts to recognize words from it, allowing a sort of silent cell phone, as well as command-and-control applications. They have a technical manual on the website, as well as a video demo of a “voiceless phone call”.
Nothing too shocking here for students of evolutionary psychology but it’s always interesting to see real world examples of how our shared behavior. There is a new book by Sebastian Junger called War, in which he recounts how men do not fight for larger ideological goals (eg. “a safer Iraq”, “finding Bin Laden”) but instead they can overcome fears because “they’re more concerned about their brothers than what happens to themselves individually”. Here’s Junger on Good Morning America:
After the jump some more from Junger and a nice talk from Robert Sapolsky about similar behaviors in chimps.
Jia, H., Rochefort, N., Chen, X., & Konnerth, A. (2010). Dendritic organization of sensory input to cortical neurons in vivo Nature, 464 (7293), 1307-1312 DOI: 10.1038/nature08947
Consider a a cortical neuron in V1, layer 2/3, whose output shows sharp orientation tuning. What are the orientation tunings of the most important inputs to that neuron? What is the spatial distribution of these inputs in the neuron’s dendritic tree?
Mosaic (genetics) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This has been done for quite awhile but I thought I’d post about it because I think it’s a neat idea — genetically manipulate experimental subjects so that only some cells have the mutation, while others are wild-type.
Movie of a load-bearing dog-like robot that can’t be kicked over, that can walk in the woods up a hill, sometimes recover from slipping on ice, walk over a pile of concrete blocks, and run.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/dist/BigDog.wmv
When Will We Be Able to Build Brains Like Ours? – by Terry Sejnowski – scientificamerican.com
Terry Sejnowski discusses the recent ‘catfight’ that erupted between Dharmenda Modha of IBM and Henry Markram of the EPFL over claims from Modha that his group had successfully modeled the brain of a cat.
Dr. Sejnowski provides a summary of the quest to describe the nervous system using computational models and introduces a central question: What level of abstraction is appropriate?
“Looking at the same neuron, physicists and engineers tend to see the simplicity whereas biologists tend to see the complexity. The problem with simplified models is that they may be throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The problem with biophysical models is that the number of details is nearly infinite and much of it is unknown. How much brain function is lost by using simplified neurons and circuits?”
Despite the differing approaches, both Modha and Markram say we’ll have a model human brain by 2019. Sejnowski claims that these will be impoverished brain models, “at best these simulations will resemble a baby brain, or perhaps a psychotic one”, but he does remain hopeful in his closing remarks:
“And gradually, as it increasingly mimics the workings of our brains, the world around us will become smarter and more efficient. As this cognitive infrastructure evolves, it may someday even reach a point where it will rival our brains in power and sophistication. Intelligence will inherit the earth.”
Submitted By: Dan Knudsen
The Moral Life of Babies – NYTimes.com.
Paul Bloom talks about research on the morality of small children, and ways in which their morality is similar to and different from adults. Concise descriptions of supporting experiments is given throughout.
Basically, babies prefer nice people over mean people, but prefer people who punish mean people over people who reward mean people. But babies are not impartial; for example, they give favorable treatment to other babies who are wearing the same tee-shirt as themselves.
Also has some content about the cognition of babies in general. Experiments show that, at various young ages, “..babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time,” and “…expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires…”, and “…know that other people can have false beliefs”.
17th Joint Symposium on Neural Computation – UCLA
Saturday, May 22, 2010
9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Registration: $35 http://www.jsnc.caltech.edu/
Want to run your research computations on Amazon’s cloud computing service?
http://aws.amazon.com/education/
No word as to when the next grant applicatiion deadline is, but it looks like an ongoing program.
Thanks to Brad Aimone, who got about $3000 worth of compute time for his research project, for alerting us to this.
When we learn new information we use only a tiny fraction of the neurons in our brain for that particular memory trace. In order to allow the molecular study of those specific neurons we combined elements of the tet system with a promoter that is activated by high level neural activity (the cfos promoter) to generate mice in which a genetic tag can be introduced into neurons that are active at a given point in time. The tag can be maintained for a prolonged period, creating a precise record of the neural activity pattern at a specific point in time. Using fear conditioning we found that the same neurons activated during learning were reactivated when the animal recalled the fearful event. We also found that these neurons were no longer activated following memory extinction, consistent with the idea that extinction modifies a component of the original memory trace.
