Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience – Page 1,315

How to Never Forget a Name? In the Future, We’ll Just Google Our Brain

Have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you where there? Or while in the middle of conversation forgot a person’s name? Or briefing your boss on a project, only to stumble because a crucial factoid escaped your mind?

Yeah, me too.

“Tip of the tongue” syndrome haunts us all — that feeling where you’re close to remembering something, but just can’t seem to get there. But what if, at that exact moment, an AI-powered “cognitive assistant” pitches in and delivers that missing piece of information straight into your ear?

Read more

CMU announces research project to reverse-engineer brain algorithms, funded by IARPA

Individual brain cells within a neural network are highlighted in this image obtained using a fluorescent imaging technique (credit: Sandra Kuhlman/CMU)

Carnegie Mellon University is embarking on a five-year, $12 million research effort to reverse-engineer the brain and “make computers think more like humans,” funded by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The research is led by Tai Sing Lee, a professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).

The research effort, through IARPA’s Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program, is part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative to revolutionize the understanding of the human brain.

A “Human Genome Project” for the brain’s visual system

“MICrONS is similar in design and scope to the Human Genome Project, which first sequenced and mapped all human genes,” Lee said. “Its impact will likely be long-lasting and promises to be a game changer in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.”

Read more

Your ability to read this message reveals something incredible about the mind

(Facebook) The above passage, written in a combination of letters and numbers, has been circulating social media for years and purports that only certain “strong minds” can read it.

That’s not exactly true — just about everybody can read the message with ease. But according to one scientist, our ability to read such messages reveals something pretty incredible about the brain.

Interpreting passages like this hardly activates the section of the brain associated with numbers, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, part of a team of Spanish cognitive scientists who wrote five papers on the subject, told Business Insider. Instead, our brain knows to treat them like letters based on their similar appearance.

Read more

Neuroscientist Discusses the Idea of Consciousness Transfer From the New Movie Self/less

A new thriller starring Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds explores the idea of transferring consciousness from one body to another. Unlike Freaky Friday, or the myriad of other family movies and comedies that have explored the idea, this one actually explores the science of the process.

In the movie Self/less, a rich business man (Kingsley) is dying of cancer. However, he is able to prolong his “self” by transferring his consciousness from one body to another using a medical procedure called “shedding.”

You may be wondering how such a far-out concept can actually have any science to it. I wondered the same thing, so I asked a neuroscientist what he thought.

Read more

DARPA’s New ‘Neural’ Microchip Could Let Drones Think Like a Human

“Full exploitation of this information is a major challenge,” officials with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wrote in a 2009 brief on “deep learning.”

“Human observation and analysis of [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] assets is essential, but the training of humans is both expensive and time-consuming. Human performance also varies due to individuals’ capabilities and training, fatigue, boredom, and human attentional capacity.”

Working with a team of researchers at MIT, DARPA is hoping to take all of that human know-how and shrink it down into processing unit no bigger than your cellphone, using a microchip known as “Eyeriss.” The concept relies on “neural networks;” computerized memory networks based on the workings of the human brain.

Read more

Create VR experiences within VR itself using Unreal Engine

Meet “Unreal Engine”; VR’s friend in VR game creations.

Epic Games has been teasing “the future of VR development” recently, and the team is finally ready to tell everyone what that is: Creating virtual reality content within virtual reality itself, using the full version of its Unreal Engine 4. Epic cofounder Tim Sweeney says that while the company’s been supporting the likes of the Oculus Rift from the outset, the irony is that, up to this point, the experiences we’ve seen so far have been developed using the same tools as traditional video games. “Now you can go into VR, have the entire Unreal editor functioning and do it live,” he says. “It almost gives you god-like powers to manipulate the world.”

So rather than using the same 2D tools (a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor) employed in traditional game development, people making experiences for VR in Unreal can now use a head-mounted display and motion controllers to manipulate objects in a 3D space. “Your brain already knows how to do this stuff because we all have an infinite amount of experience picking up and moving 3D objects,” Sweeney says. “The motions you’d do in the real world, you’d do in the editor and in the way you’d expect to; intuitively.”

Imagine walking around an environment you’re creating in real time, like a carpenter surveying his or her progress while building a house. Looking around, you notice that the pillar you dropped in place earlier is unexpectedly blocking some of the view through a window you just added. Now there isn’t a clear line of sight to the snowcapped mountain on the horizon. Within the VR update for Unreal Engine 4, you can pick the pillar up with your hands and adjust its placement until it’s right.

Read more

/* */