Yusuf Tufail, Alexei Matyushov, Nathan Baldwin, Monica L. Tauchmann, Joseph Georges, Anna Yoshihiro, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, William J. Tyler. Transcranial Pulsed Ultrasound Stimulates Intact Brain Circuits. Neuron, Volume 66, Issue 5, 681-694, 10 June 2010.
In motor cortex, ultrasound-stimulated neuronal activity was sufficient to evoke motor behaviors. Deeper in subcortical circuits, we used targeted transcranial ultrasound to stimulate neuronal activity and synchronous oscillations in the intact hippocampus. We found that ultrasound triggers TTX-sensitive neuronal activity in the absence of a rise in brain temperature (<0.01°C). Here, we also report that transcranial pulsed ultrasound for intact brain circuit stimulation has a lateral spatial resolution of approximately 2 mm and does not require exogenous factors or surgical invasion.
1. Beyond Brain Machine Interface: From Senses to Cognition
Co-sponsored by IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and Army Research Office
June 20, 2010, Long Beach, CA
Travel fellowships, poster abstracts, and registration:
http://tnsre.bme.jhu.edu/
2. 39th Neural Interfaces Conference
Co-sponsored by NIH Deep Brain Stimulation Consortium
June 21-23, 2010, Long Beach, CA
Free registration for students (Faculty Advisor letter due May 21)
Program, registration, and further information:
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?
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.
neurodudes is intended to be an open forum at the intersection of neuroscience and ai. regular readers are encouraged to post appropriate material. make sure to put your name somewhere in the post.
In Multisensory homunculi align, Bill said: Funny how philosophers of consciousness try to exclude homunculi for logical reasons even as we find more and more of them empirically…
In Why Tononi is wrong, Sean O Nuallain PhD said: Thanks for your comments I just published a paper in Biosemiotics that I think answers your question It’s at http://www.springerlink.com...
In How to prepare for a PhD in neuroscience, Eric said: I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with the stockpiling of quantitative skills and then waltzing into neuroscience like it’s...
Using Yahoo Pipes, we combined neuro/ai/cog-related RSS feeds from many sources into one, sometimes filtering along the way so as to minimize offtopic posts:
Feeds are periodically added and subtracted, but hopefully reflects the blogrolls below (but doesn't yet -- it's still under construction), except for those feeds which Yahoo Pipes had trouble processing, a list of which can be seen by checking the Pipe page.
Bayle's working on Google Reader bundles for neuroscience journals, and other neuro feeds. Like the Ultimate Neurodudes Feed, these are heavily under construction, and probably aren't very good yet.
Neurodudes is moderated by Neville Sanjana, Bayle Shanks, and Stephen Larson. Comments that you post might be delayed so that we can tell our software that it's not spam -- however, not all comments are pre-screened so don't assume that we have read them, either. Any money we make off this site is used to pay for hosting, or given to charity; if in the future we pay contributors, we will include reader-authors. None of us are medical doctors so please don't ask for medical advice. Contact us here.
