US-based Kernel released a piece of wearable helmet tech called the Kernel Flow that uses near-infrared light to scan your brain with lasers.
Category: neuroscience – Page 703
Ready, Set…Go! Brain Circuit That Triggers the Execution of Planned Movement Discovered
Summary: Researchers have identified a neural circuit that helps suppress the execution of planned actions in response to specific cues.
Source: Max Planck Florida.
Planned movement is essential to our daily lives, and it often requires delayed execution. As children, we stood crouched and ready but waited for the shout of “GO!” before sprinting from the starting line. As adults, we wait until the traffic light turns green before making a turn. In both situations, the brain has planned our precise movements but suppresses their execution until a specific cue (e.g., the shout of “GO!” or the green light).
A talk by David Pearce for the Stepping into the Future conference 2022
Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing”. Health as so conceived is inconsistent with evolution via natural selection. Lifelong good health is inconsistent with a Darwinian genome. Indeed, the vision of the World Health Organization evokes the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanists aspire to a civilization of superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence; but even an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss cannot yield complete well-being. Post-Darwinian life will be sublime, but “complete” well-being is posthuman – more akin to Buddhist nirvana. So the aim of this talk is twofold. First, I shall explore the therapeutic interventions needed to underwrite the WHO conception of good health for everyone – or rather, a recognisable approximation of lifelong good health. What genes, allelic combinations and metabolic pathways must be targeted to deliver a biohappiness revolution: life based entirely on gradients of well-being? How can we devise a more civilized signalling system for human and nonhuman animal life than gradients of mental and physical pain? Secondly, how can genome reformists shift the Overton window of political discourse in favour of hedonic uplift? How can prospective parents worldwide – and the World Health Organization – be encouraged to embrace genome reform? For only germline engineering can fix the problem of suffering and create a happy biosphere for all sentient beings.
The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce
Mapping how the 100 billion cells in the brain all fit together is the brave new world of neuroscience
These steps are repeated for each cell type, creating a richer and more complete map of the brain with each run-through.
Working together to build a brain map
Scientists now have the tools to examine the entire brain in very fine detail. There has been considerable effort to coordinate and pool data from brain mapping research labs to create comprehensive brain maps. For example, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative created the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) in which my lab participates. Collaborating research groups in the network recently released the most comprehensive map of cell types in the brain’s motor cortex across humans, monkeys and mice.
New window system allows for long-term studies of brain activity
Bilal Haider is studying how multiple areas of the brain work together for visual perception. This could help researchers understand if neural activity “traffic jams” underlie all kinds of visual impairments: from running a red light when visual attention is elsewhere, to shedding light on the autism-affected brain.
To do this kind of work, researchers need a reliable “map” of all the visual brain areas with specific coordinates for each unique brain. Drawing the map requires monitoring and recording data from an active, working brain, which usually means creating a window in the skull to watch blood flow activity.
Haider’s team has developed a better approach—a new kind of window that’s more stable and allows for longer-term studies. The assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University explains how in a paper published in February in Scientific Reports.
Neurons Are Fickle. Electric Fields Are More Reliable for Information
Summary: Electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome representational drift.
Source: MIT
A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons.
Open-Access Dataset of Macaque Brain Published
Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during rest state.
Summary: Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during resting state.
Source: KNAW
Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) have published a dataset that was recorded from the visual cortex of monkeys during the resting state.
The dataset can be shared with other researchers for analysis, used as teaching material and/or serve as a template for future publications of large electrophysiology datasets, therefore less monkeys are needed for research.
New algorithm could help enable next-generation deep brain stimulation devices
Now, a new algorithm developed by Brown University bioengineers could be an important step toward such adaptive DBS. The algorithm removes a key hurdle that makes it difficult for DBS systems to sense brain signals while simultaneously delivering stimulation.
“We know that there are electrical signals in the brain associated with disease states, and we’d like to be able to record those signals and use them to adjust neuromodulation therapy automatically,” said David Borton, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Brown and corresponding author of a study describing the algorithm. “The problem is that stimulation creates electrical artifacts that corrupt the signals we’re trying to record. So we’ve developed a means of identifying and removing those artifacts, so all that’s left is the signal of interest from the brain.”