Thought it'd be cool to have a thread on all the mind-blowing stuff that's happening in neurobiology these days.
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Music and the Brain (click on link for full article)

What is the secret of music's strange power? Seeking an answer, scientists are piecing together a picture of what happens in the brains of listeners and musicians.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DIT,

Emotions: from brain to robot (click on link for full article)

Some robots have been given emotional expressions in an attempt to improve human–computer interaction. In this article we analyze what it would mean for a robot to have emotion, distinguishing emotional expression for communication from emotion as a mechanism for the organization of behavior. Research on the neurobiology of emotion yields a deepening understanding of interacting brain structures and neural mechanisms rooted in neuromodulation that underlie emotions in humans and other animals. However, the chemical basis of animal function differs greatly from the mechanics and computations of current machines. We therefore abstract from biology a functional characterization of emotion that does not depend on physical substrate or evolutionary history, and is broad enough to encompass the possible emotions of robots.

Source: Science Daily

"...Working at Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Molecular and Biological Neuroscience, she has brought a neuroscientist’s perspective to the concept of learning, convinced that developing brains are much more plastic than has been generally believed by educators. Independent tests at Stanford University have demonstrated that developmental skills in language and reading can be dramatically improved through the intensive use of these six- to eight-week programs involving computer-based suites of exercises...

...“There’s no essential difference between children who are struggling with reading and children who are dyslexic other than perhaps in terms of severity,” Tallal observes.

Data from early testing that compared dyslexic children with children who had normal reading capabilities showed, via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans taken in real time, that the brains of the dyslexic children “rewired” themselves during the training, and areas that previously had been inert “lit up” as they were accessed. The brains of the dyslexic children more closely resembled the brains of the normal readers by the end of the program.

But Tallal saw much more far-reaching potential for Fast ForWord, convinced that non-dyslexic students could benefit as well. And the fMRI test results continue to intrigue more and more educators and public school systems across America..."

While improving reading skills and correcting dyslexia are very important, my interest is in the "rewiring" process. Understanding the process of "rewiring" could be used to disassociate traumatic experiences with object specific memories and may be beneificial in correcting panic attack triggers.

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While improving reading skills and correcting dyslexia are very important, my interest is in the "rewiring" process.
-- Eric

First molecule discovered that directs nerve cells to connect with each other (click on link for full article)

UCSF scientists have identified for the first time a molecule that directs neurons to form connections with each other during an animal's early development - creating synapses essential to all behavior.

The molecule may be one of only a few "matchmaker" proteins that instruct one type of neuron to form a synapse with another type, essentially wiring up the body during embryological development, the researchers say. Such molecules have been sought for decades, but this is the first discovered in a living animal.

The matchmaker protein, known as SYG-1, was discovered in studies of egg-laying behavior in the roundworm C. elegans. It is a member of a large family of proteins known as the immunoglobulin superfamily, and is closely related to proteins in fruit flies, mice and humans. The related molecules are always found where two different types of cells form a close connection, and SYG-1 probably receives a signal to form a synapse from the animal's egg-laying tissue, the scientists report.

Discovery of matchmaker proteins in humans may help treat disorders such as chronic epilepsy and chronic pain in which synapse formation goes awry and neurons form the "wrong" connections, said Cornelia Bargmann, PhD, professor of anatomy and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF. Knowing which proteins direct synapse formation may also help in treatment of peripheral nerve damage, which requires nerves to reconnect with precisely the right partner from among many in their immediate environment...

NASA is developing a subvocal speech system that could enable you to make a phone call while keeping your lips sealed. (Click on link for full article)

How do you talk to someone without opening your mouth? Psychics call it telepathy. NASA refers to it as subvocal speech. Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have developed a system of tiny sensors that read nerve signals in the throat that control speech. You may not make a sound when, say, you read silently, but your nervous system is buzzing with activity. Recently, they used the system to make the first subvocal cell phone call.

Awesome DIT, the subvocal stuff is cool but thanks for the tip to Cornelia Bargmann studies. I haven't gotten away from there long enough to check out what Shen is doing.

Olfaction and Olfactory Navigation
In C. elegans, as in other animals, odors are detected by large families of specialized G protein–coupled receptors. Individual C. elegans olfactory neurons express multiple receptor genes, allowing a few cells to detect many odors. The odors that activate one sensory neuron regulate a common behavioral output, such as attraction or avoidance. Expression of a foreign receptor within a sensory neuron can produce an artificial behavior, in which transgenic animals respond to activation of the foreign receptor. The artificial behavior resembles the behavior generated by the sensory neuron in response to natural odors. This result shows that sensory neurons are dedicated to characteristic behavioral responses.

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...if it's that small a world, it starts to smell funny...
-- Eric's sig

Works beautifully with your post Eric
I wonder if memory evolved so that organisms could tell whether a smell was getting stronger or weaker and thus move towards it or away from it?

Article on Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) from 2002; not sure how far it's progressed since then:

Controlling Robots with the Mind

But how does one avoid the world getting smaller

Damn, I just realized I forgot to post the link.
If you go, check out the Janelia Farm. Interesting.

Controlling machinery remotely with the mind could be potentially more precise than using hand controls and using an added simstim like feedback to the controller indicating the machine's pitch and roll and resistance etc. A person could turn the turret and lower the boom from a safe distance. High skill operations.

Cool - thanks for the link, Eric!

Came across this today:

Brain networks change according to cognitive task
Using a newly released method to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Northwestern University researchers have demonstrated that the interconnections between different parts of the brain are dynamic and not static. This and other findings answer longstanding debates about how brain networks operate to solve different cognitive tasks. They are presented in the current (June 1) issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Equally important, the researchers discovered that the brain region that performed the integration of information shifted depending on the task their subjects performed. In this study, the subjects were assigned two language tasks. In both, subjects were asked to read individual words and then make a spelling or rhyming judgment.

"We found that one network takes different configurations depending on the goal of the task,"

Mirror Neurons

Healthy human beings are intensely social. This excellent NOVA scienceNOW presentation discusses how a recently discovered system in the brain - mirror neurons - may help explain why we humans can get so worked up watching other people.

A new study using pro dancers finds that your physical skills determine how your mirror neuron system responds to observed movement.

Includes a 14 minute broadcast segment on the discovery and significance of mirror neurons.

Brain activity monitored using Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer

A breakthrough in nanotechnology has enabled doctors accurately to measure the levels of crucial chemicals in living brain cells in real time and at the level of a single cell.

Scientists at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology claim to be the first successfully to apply genetic nanotechnology using molecular sensors to view changes in brain chemical levels. The sensors alter their three-dimensional form on binding with the chemical, which is then visible via a process known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or Fret.

A newly published study from the scientists reveals how the nanosensors were introduced into nerve cells to measure the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate, the major brain chemical that increases nerve-cell activity in mammalian brains. It is involved in everything from learning and memory to mood and perception. Too much glutamate is believed to contribute to conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the report stated.

"The fluorescent imaging technique allows us to see living cells do their jobs live and in colour," explained Sakiko Okumoto, lead author of the study at Carnegie. Fret is like two musical tuning forks which have the same tone. If you excite one, it gives a characteristic tone. If you bring the second fork close to the first one, it will also start to give you a tone even though they do not touch. This is resonance energy transfer."

Wolf Frommer, leader of the Fret team at Carnegie, added: "This is a tremendously exciting technology. I'm anxious to see what we can learn about the vast complexities of the brain over the coming years."

Smaller screens, bigger brains

"The articles in "Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine" correlated the amount of television young children watched with test scores and achievement as grown-ups.

In one study, Robert Hancox, Barry Milne and Richie Poulton, researchers at the Dunedin School of Medicine, studied 1,000 New Zealanders, most of whom were 26 years old. They found that the more time the research subjects had spent watching TV during childhood, the more likely they were not to have made it through college. TV watching as a teen and especially during adolescence made it more likely they were to have left school without a sixth-form certificate, the degree needed to go on to university.

The findings held true regardless of sex, intelligence or socio-economic status, the researchers found. They posit that there's a simple trade-off between watching television and doing homework -- with no intellectual benefits to the tube.

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Finally, Frederick Zimmerman and Dimitri Christakis of the University of Washington analyzed data on kids' TV habits in order to study the effect of watching TV and reading skills development. They looked at scores on three reading and comprehension tests.

Children under three watched an average of 2.2 hours per day; at ages 3 to 5 years, the daily average was 3.3 hours. The under-three couch potatoes had lower scores on all three tests. However, kids in the three-to-five age group showed a 0.51 percent improvement in the reading recognition test for every hour they watched.

Zimmerman and Christakis concluded that watching TV could stunt the thinking of children under three. They advised parents to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines and not let kids under two watch TV at all.

Chips coming to a brain near you

"Professor Theodore W. Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, is creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, an area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories.

And it's no longer a question of "if" but "when." The six teams involved in the multi-laboratory effort, including USC, the University of Kentucky and Wake Forest University, have been working together on different components of the neural prosthetic for nearly a decade.
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Berger's team began its research by studying the re-encoding process performed by neurons in slices of rat hippocampi kept alive in nutrients. By stimulating these neurons with randomly generated computer signals and studying the output patterns, the group determined a set of mathematical functions that transformed any given arbitrary input pattern in the same manner that the biological neurons do.

Dr. John J. Granacki, director of the Advanced Systems Division at USC, has been working on translating these mathematical functions onto a microchip. The resulting chip is meant to simulate the processing of biological neurons in the slice of rat hippocampus: accepting electrical impulses, processing them and then sending on the transformed signals. The researchers say the microchip is doing exactly that, with a stunning 95 percent accuracy rate.
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The team expects it will take two to three years to develop the mathematical models for the hippocampus of a live, active rat and translate them onto a microchip, and seven or eight years for a monkey. They hope to apply this approach to clinical applications within 10 years. If everything goes well, they anticipate seeing an artificial human hippocampus, potentially usable for a variety of clinical disorders, in 15 years

“If you think of brain circuits as locked rooms, the vasopressin receptor as a lock on the door, and vasopressin as the key that fits it, only those circuits that have the receptors can be ‘opened’ or influenced by the hormone,” added Hammock. “An animal’s response to vasopressin thus depends upon which rooms have the locks and our research shows that the distribution of the receptors is determined by the length of the microsatellites.”


This is last month's news but it reminded me of Gene Wolfe's alzabo and an entire life's memories being accessible through eating flesh with the alzabo. I always imagined the alzabo allowed the splicing and translation of some junk DNA.

NIH The junk dna part is in the article

Cool bit of synchronicity there, Eric... just read about how jumping genes formerly considered junk DNA have been found to contribute to the uniqueness of individual brains (article)

"Brains are marvels of diversity: no two are the same, not even those of otherwise identical twins. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found one explanation for the puzzling variety in brain organisation and function: mobile elements, pieces of DNA that can jump from one place in the genome to another, randomly changing the genetic information in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly different ways."

I think they better drop the term "junk" DNA and replace it with "WTF is this for??" DNA.

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Originally posted by DIT:
Cool bit of synchronicity there, Eric... just read about how jumping genes formerly considered junk DNA have been found to contribute to the uniqueness of individual brains...
I think they better drop the term "junk" DNA and replace it with "WTF is this for??" DNA.

I like WTF DNA. The ease of the WTF DNA mutability is very scary and promising at the same time. I want to think the differences are a result of experiences stored temporarily and genetically but thats way off base from this. I still have a lot of learning to do.

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The ease of the WTF DNA mutability is very scary and promising at the same time.

Yeah, and it's kind of reassuring in a strange way, too. It sounds like WTF DNA provides some randomization factors that play a key role in the immune system, reproduction and the brain, especially in regions governing behaviour and personality. I kinda like the idea that we're not all just perfect manifestations of the patterns passed down through the ages in our DNA, that there's a bit of randomness at play that makes each of us truly unique. It sounds like even clones might have slightly different behaviour and personality from their progenitor and each other.

"I still have a lot of learning to do" is something I've been saying a lot the last few years. It's kind of a fact of life these days, with the learning curves all going vertical. I've recently started to think of it as a profoundly positive thing to say, however. It's so awesome to live at a time when all of these new discoveries are being made...

Better talk to Wage...I mean Gage.

"[Fred]Gage now believes that changes in behavior like exercising more can affect neurogenesis and alter the brain's wiring. "The idea is that we have control over who we are, even as adults," he says. We're used to thinking that our minds control our bodies. Could it be the other way around? Could what we do change the structure of our brains? It's a radical idea-one that turns on its head accepted ideas of nature vs. nurture. And since Gage has some experience toppling long-standing biological truths, it's probably worth considering."
Source

Very interesting all these neuro-updates. I´m not very skilled in neuroscience myself, but as I´m into speek-language pathologies, I´m often connecting to this knowledge. The "mirror neurons" reminded me on the estimated childpsychologist Daniel Stern and a lecture he gave on the human childs ability not only to mimic shortly after birth, but also to mimic the other persons bare intentions of movement and how this particular skill is dividing humans from I think chimpanses.