22 year old, Systems theory junkie, INTP, Grey-A, Transhumanist, and Feminist.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Badass Scientist of the Week: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909—) is a Jewish Italian neuroscientist and Nobel Prize laureate, born in Turin on 22nd April, 1909. At age of 20, she decided that she would like to study medicine, defying her traditionalist father’s views on women. She graduated in 1936 with a summa cum laude degree in medicine and surgery, opting to stay on afterwards to specialise in neurobiology and psychiatry. Unfortunately, World War Two was on the horizon and Mussolini issued the Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza (Manifesto in the Defence of Race) in the same year, prohibiting Jewish Italian citizens from entering higher education or professional careers. Undeterred, she set up a laboratory in her bedroom studying the growth of nerve fibres in chicken embryos. In 1941, heavy bombing of Turin forced her to move her laboratory out of the city and into a small cottage in the countryside, where she continued for another two years. In 1943, during the German occupation of Italy, she and her family were forced to flee Turin completely and head to Florence, where she stayed until the end of the war, working as a physician. After the war, she was offered a post at the University of Washington, where she stayed for 30 years. In 1952 she discovered Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), for which she received the 1986 Nobel Prize. Today, at 103 years old, she is still active in the field of neurobiology and works at the European Brain Research Institute in Rome, as well as running the science education centre for African women she founded in 1992, and is an active senator of the Italian parliament. She attributes her age to daily doses of NGF, which she takes in the form of eye drops. She is the only Nobel Prize laureate to reach 100 years old.
Guest article written by Stephen (apoptotica.tumblr.com)
Staying on task
Its full name is the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, but Spaun sounds way more epic. It’s the latest version of a techno brain, the creation of a Canadian research team at the University of Waterloo.
So what makes Spaun different from a mindboggingly smart artificial brain like IBM’s Watson? Put simply, Watson is designed to work like a supremely powerful search engine, digging through an enormous amount of data at breakneck speed and using complex algorithms to derive an answer. It doesn’t really care about how the process works; it’s mainly about mastering information retrieval.
But Spaun tries to actually mimic the human brain’s behavior and does so by performing a series of tasks, all different from each other. It’s a computer model that can not only recognize numbers with its virtual eye and remember them, but also can manipulate a robotic arm to write them down.
Spaun’s “brain” is divided into two parts, loosely based on our cerebral cortex and basil ganglia and its simulated 2.5 million neurons–our brains have 100 billion–are designed to mimic how researchers think those two parts of the brain interact.
Say, for instance, that its “eye” sees a series of numbers. The artificial neurons take that visual data and route it into the cortex where Spaun uses it to perform a number of different tasks, such as counting, copying the figures, or solving number puzzles.
Soon it will be forgetting birthdays
But there’s been an interesting twist to Spaun’s behavior. As Francie Diep wrote in Tech News Daily, it became more human than its creators expected.
Ask it a question and it doesn’t answer immediately. No, it pauses slightly, about as long as a human might. And if you give Spaun a long list of numbers to remember, it has an easier time recalling the ones it received first and last, but struggles a bit to remember the ones in the middle.
“There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture,” says Chris Eliasmith, Spaun’s chief inventor. “It’s definitely not on the same scale. But it gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do.”
Brain drains
The fact that Spaun can move from one task to another brings us one step closer to being able to understand how our brains are able to shift so effortlessly from reading a note to memorizing a phone number to telling our hand to open a door.
And that could help scientists equip robots with the ability to be more flexible thinkers, to adjust on the fly. Also, because Spaun operates more like a human brain, researchers could use it to run health experiments that they couldn’t do on humans.
Recently, for instance, Eliasmith ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age. He wanted to see how the loss of neurons affected the model’s performance on an intelligence test.
One thing Eliasmith hasn’t been able to do is to get Spaun to recognize if it’s doing a good or a bad job. He’s working on it.
Practicing my pre-processing and modeling speed: matlab, spm8 and cursing out loud.
Blind patient reads words stimulated directly onto retina: neuroprosthetic device uses implant to project visual braille
Before I started studying psychology I didn’t realise how much it actually covers as a topic. I thought that it was merely about studying when behaviour and thoughts are disrupted by brain disorders (i.e. clinical psychology). Once I went to University however, my mind was totally changed. Suddenly I was learning about how people read, how people communicate and how people perceive the world around them. So this post, while some might think it is a bit of a deviation away from psychology, is really about a psychological topic that I find really fascinating: perception.
For the first time, researchers have streamed braille patterns directly into a blind patient’s retina, allowing him to read four letter words accurately and quickly. This device (the Argus II) has been implanted in over 50 patients, many of who can no see colour, movement and objects.
The device uses a small camera mounted on a pair of glasses, a portable processor to translate the signal from the camera into electrical stimulation, and a microchip with electrodes implanted directly onto the retina.
“In this clinical test with a single blind patient, we bypassed the camera that is the usual input for the implant and directly stimulated the retina. Instead of feeling the braille on the tips of his fingers, the patient could see the patterns we projected and then read individual letters in less than a second with up to 89% accuracy,” explains researcher Thomas Lauritzen, lead author of the paper.
Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing
The fascinating neurological differences between listening and hearing, how our bodies automatically filter the surprising or important from the background, and what our modern digital age may mean for our listening abilities. Fascinating stuff from the NY Times:
This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect.
This is where attention kicks in.
Take a moment and listen to your surroundings. Coworkers talking, machines whirring, air conditioning humming, printer printing, dogs barking … you can voluntarily pick out any number of sounds when you focus on that input.
The real mindbender is that your brain is always listening to those noises, but it doesn’t trigger you to consciously listen unless it is startling or out of the ordinary. Chew on that for a while … the idea that we are always listening but rarely hearing is pretty freakin’ cool.
The Science Of Intuition
Klint Finley
Maria Popova recently reviewed on Answers for Aristotle, a book on the science of intuition by Massimo Pigliucci. The snap summary: intuition is essentially subconscious pattern recognition. Here’s an excerpt Popova included:
One of the first things that modern research on intuition has clearly shown is that there is no such thing as an intuitive person tout court. Intuition is a domain-specific ability, so that people can be very intuitive about one thing (say, medical practice, or chess playing) and just as clueless as the average person about pretty much everything else. Moreover, intuitions get better with practice — especially with a lot of practice — because at bottom intuition is about the brain’s ability to pick up on certain recurring patterns; the more we are exposed to a particular domain of activity the more familiar we become with the relevant patterns (medical charts, positions of chess pieces), and the more and faster our brains generate heuristic solutions to the problem we happen to be facing within that domain.
Full Story: The Science of “Intuition”
See also:
“Neuroscientists don’t believe in souls—But that doesn’t mean they can’t sell theirs”
Funding in research is nightmare to me for a lot of reasons, mostly political-academic bs, so naturally, my soul is for sale right now on Ebay. But lately, I’ve been talking to a mentor (outside of my program) about the ethics surrounding funding. One of my favorite topics covered in this older article by John Horgan, talks about the ethics we face regarding militarization of neuroscience which makes a lot of researchers nervous since their happy go lucky findings/discoveries could be used for killing & destruction or at best, enforcing peace - so not best at all, huh.
Neuroscientists are attempting to solve the most profound secrets of human existence. They should adhere to higher ethical standards than defense contractors and infomercial pitchmen. [via]
To the point where:
Some neuroscientists have gone further, calling on their colleagues to sign to pledge “to Refuse to Participate in the Application of Neuroscience to Violations of Basic Human Rights or International Law.” [via]Fair enough since we are talking about drones, unmanned ships, AI, autonomous robots, transcranial magnetic stimulators and neural prostheses. Horgan’s latest article (complete with what I’m calling a Lehrer clause at the end) goes a little deeper into the whys and why nots, both compelling, along with a nice overview of the projects underway. Give it read, this is a debate well worth having.
Sidebar oversimplification: ya know kids, 80’s Val Kilmer taught me there’s going to be a potentially undesirable way to abuse science/engineering advancements and when involving our military… it’s a no brainer.
[img: ohsweetorchard]
Your brain by the numbers.
Credits: Dwayne Godwin/Jorge Cham
Source (Scientific American)
Medical devices powered by the ear itself
Deep in the inner ear of mammals is a natural battery — a chamber filled with ions that produces an electrical potential to drive neural signals. In today’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, a team of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) demonstrate for the first time that this battery could power implantable electronic devices without impairing hearing.
The devices could monitor biological activity in the ears of people with hearing or balance impairments, or responses to therapies. Eventually, they might even deliver therapies themselves.
