Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past twenty years, neuroscientists have been quietly building a revolutionary technology called BrainGate that wirelessly connects the human mind to computers and it just hit the world stage. Entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have entered the race with goals of figuring out how to get computer chips into everyone’s brains. The attention of Musk and Zuckerberg means the potential for giant leaps forward. But the question no one seems to be asking is whether our dependence on machines and technology has finally gone too far. Countries annually celebrate their independence from other countries, but it now seems we should start asking deeper questions about our personal independence.

60 Minutes recently ran a piece showing how engineers are using what scientists have learned about the brain to manipulate us into staying perpetually addicted to our smartphones. The anxiety most of us feel when we are away from our phone is real: During the 60 Minutes piece, researchers at California State University Dominguez Hills connected electrodes to reporter Anderson Cooper’s fingers to measure changes in heart rate and perspiration. Then they sent text messages to his phone, which was out of his reach, and watched his anxiety spike with each notification.

The segment revealed that virtually every app on your phone is calibrated to keep you using it as often and as long as possible. The show made an important point: a relatively small number of Silicon Valley engineers are experimenting with, and changing in a significant way, human behavior and brain function. And they’re doing it with little insight into the long-term consequences. It seems the fight for independence has gone digital.

Continue reading “Hacking The Brain: The Future Computer Chips In Your Head” »

New computer program uses brain activity to draw images of airplanes, leopards, and stained-glass windows.

The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. The new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.

NEW ORLEANS—Exposure to the widely used chemical bisphenol A (BPA) during pregnancy, even at levels lower than the regulated “safe” human exposure level, can lead to changes in circadian rhythms, according to a mice study to be presented Monday at ENDO 2019, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans, La. The researchers report these changes may be a contributing factor in hyperactivity seen in BPA-exposed mice.

“The hypothalamus, which we have identified as a brain region that is particularly susceptible to developmental disruption by BPA, contains the site of the clock cells that govern daily rhythms throughout the body,” said researcher Deborah Kurrasch, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Canada. “We have shown in previous research that BPA exposure in utero can cause defects to the development of hypothalamic nuclei and hyperactivity, and here we explored whether a shift in circadian biology might explain why the animals moved more.”

BPA is a chemical that is added to many commercial products, including water bottles, paper receipts, can liners and food storage containers. It is known as an endocrine-disrupting chemical—a chemical that interferes with the body’s hormones.

Researchers identify a major risk factor for pernicious effects of misinformation.

• By David Z. Hambrick, Madeline Marquardt on February 6, 2018

What happens in our brain when we listen to the rhythmic pace of a song or when, at the traffic light, the light is red and we are trembling awaiting the green? How do we perceive such an abstract feature of the world? For the first time in humans, an imaging study shows that in a specific area of the brain, the so-called “supplementary motor area (SMA)”, a time map exists. The study, conducted by the team led by SISSA Professor Domenica Bueti and published in PLOS Biology, shows that distinct portions of the SMA, a region of the cerebral cortex important for both motor preparation and time perception—respond preferentially to different durations. The portions of the SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface according to an anterior-to-posterior spatial gradient. The most anterior portions of SMA are greatly active for the shortest duration (200 ms), while the most posterior bits are active for the longest duration (3 sec), the intermediate durations led to the activation of the cortex between those extremes. These novel findings, which are the result of a collaborative effort between SISSA and research institutions in Japan, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are important to gain insights on the computational architecture underlying time perception and they also open up new perspectives to the study of temporal cognition.

The representation of time

“Topography i.e., the fact that neurons processing similar stimulus properties occupy neighbouring positions on the nervous system, is an encoding mechanism widely used in the brain to represent sensory and motor information. For example, there is a body map in our primary somatosensory cortex. In this map, the portions of the cortex receiving tactile information from the hand and the wrist are neighbours compared to those receiving information from the toe” says Domenica Bueti, coordinator of the research whose leading author is the Greek researcher Foteini Protopapa: “our findings show that a topographic representation exists also for something immaterial like time”. Previous studies conducted in humans and other animals have shown the involvement of SMA in time perception. However none of those previous works clarified how temporal information is represented in this area.

A team led by Lida Kanari now reports a new system for distinguishing cell types in the brain, an algorithmic classification method that the researchers say will benefit the entire field of neuroscience. Blue Brain founder Professor Henry Markram says, “For nearly 100 years, scientists have been trying to name cells. They have been describing them in the same way that Darwin described animals and trees. Now, the Blue Brain Project has developed a mathematical algorithm to objectively classify the shapes of the neurons in the brain. This will allow the development of a standardized taxonomy [classification of cells into distinct groups] of all cells in the brain, which will help researchers compare their data in a more reliable manner.”

The team developed an algorithm to distinguish the shapes of the most common type of neuron in the neocortex, the pyramidal cells. Pyramidal cells are distinctively tree-like cells that make up 80 percent of the neurons in the neocortex, and like antennas, collect information from other neurons in the brain. Basically, they are the redwoods of the brain forest. They are excitatory, sending waves of electrical activity through the network, as people perceive, act, and feel.

The father of modern neuroscience, Ramón y Cajal, first drew pyramidal cells over 100 years ago, observing them under a microscope. Yet up until now, scientists have not reached a consensus on the types of pyramidal neurons. Anatomists have been assigning names and debating the different types for the past century, while neuroscience has been unable to tell for sure which types of neurons are subjectively characterized. Even for visibly distinguishable neurons, there is no common ground to consistently define morphological types.

Continue reading “Blue Brain solves a century-old neuroscience problem” »

Childhood trauma such as neglectful parenting causes physical scarring to the brain and increases the risk of severe depression, a new study has found.

For the first time, scientists have linked changes in the structure of the brain both to traumatic early-years experiences and poor mental health in later life.

Published in the Lancet, the study found a “significant” link between adults who had experienced maltreatment as children with a smaller insular cortex, part of the brain believed to help regulate emotion.

Continue reading “Childhood trauma scars the brain and boosts depression risk” »

Newly funded 4-year program aims to better define research questions about free will and bring more rigor to its study.