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Category: neuroscience – Page 891

Israeli treatment could delay deadly effects of ALS – new study

Specifically, AstroRx is a cell therapy product containing functional healthy astrocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells that aim to protect diseased motor neurons. The cells are injected in the patient through the spinal canal.

The company initiated its first ALS clinical trials in March 2018.

Prof. Michel Revel, founder and CEO of the company and winner of both the EMET Prize and the Israel Prize, said that the clinical trial results “provide the confidence needed to move forward” with cohorts B and C, which he said both “hold the potential for a prolonged response.”

A Surprising New Source of Attention in the Brain Raises New Questions

As you read this line, you’re bringing each word into clear view for a brief moment while blurring out the rest, perhaps even ignoring the roar of a leaf blower outside. It may seem like a trivial skill, but it’s actually fundamental to almost everything we do. If the brain weren’t able to pick and choose what portion of the incoming flood of sensory information should get premium processing, the world would look like utter chaos—an incomprehensible soup of attention-hijacking sounds and sights.

Meticulous research over decades has found that the control of this vital ability, called selective attention, belongs to a handful of areas in the brain’s parietal and frontal lobes. Now a new study suggests that another area in an unlikely location—the temporal lobe—also steers the spotlight of attention.

The unexpected addition raises new questions in what has long been considered a settled scientific field. “The last time an attention controlling area was discovered was 30 years ago,” says Winrich Freiwald, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neural Systems, who published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on November 4, 2019, “This is a fundamental discovery that might require a rethinking of old concepts about attentional control.”

Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

If you’re interested in mind uploading, I have a book that I highly recommend. Rethinking Consciousness is a book by Michael S. A. Graziano, who is a Princeton University professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Early in his book Graziano writes a short summary:

“This book, however, is written entirely for the general reader. In it, I attempt to spell out, as simply and clearly as possible, a promising scientific theory of consciousness — one that can apply equally to biological brains and artificial machines.”

The theory is Attention Schema Theory.

I found this work compelling because one of the main issues in mind uploading is how do you make an inanimate object (like a robot or a computer) conscious? Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory provides a methodology.

After reading the book, be sure to read the Appendix, in which he writes:

“First, it serves as a tutorial on the attention schema theory. The underlying logic of the theory will be described in its simplest form. Second, I hope that the exercise will show engineers a general path forward for artificial consciousness.”

Continue reading “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience” | >

Keep exercising: New study finds it’s good for your brain’s gray matter

Cardiorespiratory exercise—walking briskly, running, biking and just about any other exercise that gets your heart pumping—is good for your body, but can it also slow cognitive changes in your brain?

A study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases provides new evidence of an association between and brain health, particularly in and total brain volume—regions of the brain involved with cognitive decline and aging.

Brain tissue is made up of gray matter and filaments called white matter that extend from the gray matter cells. The volume of gray matter appears to correlate with various skills and cognitive abilities. The researchers found that increases in peak oxygen uptake are strongly associated with increased gray matter volume.

Hearing through lip-reading

“Brain activity synchronizes with sound waves, even without audible sound, through lip-reading, according to new research published in JNeurosci.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_re…/2020–01/sfn-htl010220.php

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Decoder translates brain activity into speech

Neurological conditions or injuries that result in the inability to communicate can be devastating. Patients with such speech loss often rely on alternative communication devices that use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) or nonverbal head or eye movements to control a cursor to spell out words. While these systems can enhance quality-of-life, they can only produce around 5–10 words per minute, far slower than the natural rate of human speech.

Researchers from the University of California San Francisco today published details of a neural decoder that can transform brain activity into intelligible synthesized speech at the rate of a fluent speaker (Nature 10.1038/s41586-019‑1119-1).

“It has been a longstanding goal of our lab to create technology to restore communication for patients with severe speech disabilities,” explains neurosurgeon Edward Chang. “We want to create technologies that can generate synthesized speech directly from human brain activity. This study provides a proof-of-principle that this is possible.”