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Tag Archives: neuroscience
One gene helped human brains become complex
Two extra copies of the SRGAP2 gene appear to have led to slower human brain development, but denser interconnection between neurons, possibly contributing to our current cognitive abilities. (Total brain interconnectivity correlates moderately well with IQ.) Makes one wonder about … Continue reading
Nano-devices that cross blood-brain barrier
In my upcoming sci-fi novel Nexus , I write about a nano-device that can cross the blood-brain barrier and which has a very real impact on the mind. Not so far fetched… A team of scientists from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have … Continue reading
Duke Researchers Send Touch Sensations into the Brain
More advances in mind-machine interfaces this week. MIguel Nicolelis (a pioneer in neural interfaces) and colleagues announced that they were able to send touch sensory data into the brains of monkeys. So the tally is now: Vision: In and … Continue reading
Reconstruction from brain activity – YouTube
Below is a clip showing the reconstruction of video subjects where shown via MRI scanning of their brains. Pretty remarkable. The ‘reconstructed’ video looks odd because the reconstruction method was actually to match the brain activity against snippets … Continue reading
Rat cyborg gets digital cerebellum
New Scientist covers another step towards functional neural prosthetics. Development here will be slow and complex, but we now have sufficient proof of concept across the field to see that interfacing digital systems with out brains is quite possible. … Continue reading
Memory Prosthetics – Some Progress
Theodore Berger and team, who I’ve been following since describing their work in More Than Human, achieved success earlier this year in recording a rat memory during encoding, and playing it back to the rat later. This is a very … Continue reading
Uncertainty and Conditioning
>The article below quotes research stating that uncertain outcome produces more uncertainty than clear negative outcomes. That makes sense from an adaptive standpoint. Makes me wonder if that is the the same mechanism underlying the advantage of inconsistent conditioning over … Continue reading