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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,012
More info. on some research that I came across a few weeks ago on a new bioimaging technique to help map and understand the nervous system which is one of the hardest areas of the brain to map and monitor — this is truly groundbreaking on so many fronts such as precision meds. research, computer mapping of the brain and neuro pathways, etc. If will be very impressive to see how much this accelerates the efforts in finding a cure for diseases such as Dystonia.
MUNICH, Germany, Aug. 22 (UPI) — Scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University have developed a technique for turning the body of a deceased rodent entirely transparent, revealing the central nervous system in unprecedented clarity.
Researchers are hopeful the new and improved view will help scientists understand how traumatic brain injuries, strokes and aging yield chronic disorders like dementia and epilepsy.
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I’ve been reading Ramez Naam’s fantastic book “Nexus,” which is set in a near-future where a powerful nano-drug allows human minds to connect together. In the story, a group of enterprising neuroscientists and engineers discover they can use the drug in a new way — to run a computer operating system inside their brains. Naam’s characters telepathically communicate with each other using a mental chat app and even manipulate other people’s bodies by gaining control of their brains’ operating systems.
Sounds far-fetched, right?
It might not be as far-fetched as you think. From connecting a human brain to a basic tablet to help a paralyzed patient communicate with the outside world to memory-boosting brain implants and a prototype computer chip that runs on live neurons — the real world progress we’re seeing today is nearly as strange as fiction.
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Dean Radin, Ph.D. and Chief Scientist of IONS, the Institute for Noetic Sciences, recently introduced the results of a series of experiments that may provide the missing link between consciousness and matter, turning the tables on materialism and asserting consciousness as a fundamental component of reality itself. Using a variation of the famous double-slit experiment, he and his team hypothesized that the conscious intent of a human mind might be able to collapse a quantum wave function without direct interaction. Simply by concentrating they postulated, meditation might be able to affect and influence quantum particles – the smallest components of matter that form our physical universe. .
Initial experiments used participants 2 meters away from the device. Alternating between asking participants to concentrate on the apparatus, then removing their attention showed astounding results. Fearing that temperature differences or other variables might have influenced the test, they offered the experiment to participants online. Using several thousand robotic control sessions to ensure that a determination could be made for the factor of human consciousness, the results were likewise astounding, with initial trial results of greater than 5 sigma.
Dr. Radin’s video from the April 2016 conference introducing the results from this experiment is available online through the IONS channel. I highly recommend watching the video in its entirety to get a full understanding of the experiment results, research protocols, variables, controls and the results from other labs and researchers who have replicated these results.
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The new BMI stentrode came from the research on sheep; nice to know for the next Trivia night at the local pub.
A group of Australian and American researchers have used sheep to develop and test a new device (original paper) – the stentrode – for recording electrical signals from inside the brain. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology. This new technology removes one of the main obstacles to developing efficient brain-computer interfaces: the need for invasive surgery.
The “stentrode” is a group of small (750 µm) recording electrodes attached to an intracranial endovascular stent, which allows implantation of the electrodes inside the brain without invasive surgery. This allows high quality recording or stimulation of specific areas of the brain, without many of the risks associated with invasive brain surgery.
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When the Holiday season kicks off next fall (2017); I have a feeling that I may end up buying a Penny Robot or a BMI controlled drone for my niece & nephews.
The post is also available in: Hebrew :הכתבה זמינה גם ב
A new research out of Arizona State University with DARPA funding.
Using a skullcap fitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer, researchers are able to control multiple drones using human thought and vision to guide the quadcopters wirelessly. The device records electrical brain activity and measures the movement of the drones based on parts of the brain that light up. This signal is monitored and sent to another computer that transmits a signal to the drones, making them move. Panagiotis Artemiadis, director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, has been working with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Air Force to develop this technology. Artemiadis has been working on brain-to-machine interfaces since 2009, but only recently made the leap to controlling more than one device.
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Summary: Researchers have optimized optogenetics to map the neural circuits of the rodent brain with single neuron resolution.
Source: Max Planck Florida.
Researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience are optimizing optogenetic methods for circuit mapping, enabling measurements of functional synaptic connectivity with single neuron resolution.
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Sinais químicos do cérebro visto em tempo real.
Os investigadores injectaram estas células, conhecidas como CNiFERs (baseados em células repórteres fluorescentes modificadas neurotransmissor) no cérebro de ratos 13. Em seguida, eles cortaram uma janela para o cr nio de cada rato para expor seu cérebro e colocar uma tampa transparente em cima do buraco para que pudessem assistir as células acender em tempo real através de um microscópio.
A técnica é uma melhoria em métodos atuais, pois quantifica neurotransmissores diretamente em vez de calculá-los através de seus efeitos. “É um dos testes mais puros que você pode fazer”.
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The hard problem of consciousness must be approached through the ontological lens of 20th century physics, which tells us that reality is information theoretic and quantized at the level of Planck scale spacetime. Through careful deduction, it becomes clear that information cannot exist without consciousness – the awareness of things. And to be aware is to hold the meaning of relationships of objects within consciousness – perceiving abstract objects, while enjoying degrees of freedom within the structuring of those relationships. This defines consciousness as language – a set of objects and an ordering scheme with degrees of freedom used for expressing meaning. And since even information at the Planck scale cannot exist without consciousness, we propose an entity called a “primitive unit of consciousness”, which acts as a mathematical operator in a quantized spacetime language. Quasicrystal mathematics based on E8 geometry seems to be a candidate for the language of reality, possessing several qualities corresponding to recent physical discoveries and various physically realistic unification models.
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