The Future is NOW: Training Pilots Through the use of Electroneural Stimulation

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Modulates Neuronal Activity and Learning in Pilot Training

Authors:

Choe et al

Abstract:

Skill acquisition requires distributed learning both within (online) and across (offline) days to consolidate experiences into newly learned abilities. In particular, piloting an aircraft requires skills developed from extensive training and practice. Here, we tested the hypothesis that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can modulate neuronal function to improve skill learning and performance during flight simulator training of aircraft landing procedures. Thirty-two right-handed participants consented to participate in four consecutive daily sessions of flight simulation training and received sham or anodal high-definition-tDCS to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) or left motor cortex (M1) in a randomized, double-blind experiment. Continuous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) were collected during flight simulation, n-back working memory, and resting-state assessments. tDCS of the right DLPFC increased midline-frontal theta-band activity in flight and n-back working memory training, confirming tDCS-related modulation of brain processes involved in executive function. This modulation corresponded to a significantly different online and offline learning rates for working memory accuracy and decreased inter-subject behavioral variability in flight and n-back tasks in the DLPFC stimulation group. Additionally, tDCS of left M1 increased parietal alpha power during flight tasks and tDCS to the right DLPFC increased midline frontal theta-band power during n-back and flight tasks. These results demonstrate a modulation of group variance in skill acquisition through an increasing in learned skill consistency in cognitive and real-world tasks with tDCS. Further, tDCS performance improvements corresponded to changes in electrophysiological and blood-oxygenation activity of the DLPFC and motor cortices, providing a stronger link between modulated neuronal function and behavior.

pop sci write up.

This is my reaction.

New World Monkeys Percieve Pitch Like Humans

Complex pitch perception mechanisms are shared by humans and a New World monkey

Authors:

Song et al

Abstract:

The perception of the pitch of harmonic complex sounds is a crucial function of human audition, especially in music and speech processing. Whether the underlying mechanisms of pitch perception are unique to humans, however, is unknown. Based on estimates of frequency resolution at the level of the auditory periphery, psychoacoustic studies in humans have revealed several primary features of central pitch mechanisms. It has been shown that (i) pitch strength of a harmonic tone is dominated by resolved harmonics; (ii) pitch of resolved harmonics is sensitive to the quality of spectral harmonicity; and (iii) pitch of unresolved harmonics is sensitive to the salience of temporal envelope cues. Here we show, for a standard musical tuning fundamental frequency of 440 Hz, that the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), a New World monkey with a hearing range similar to that of humans, exhibits all of the primary features of central pitch mechanisms demonstrated in humans. Thus, marmosets and humans may share similar pitch perception mechanisms, suggesting that these mechanisms may have emerged early in primate evolution.

You Will NOT be Uploaded: a Most Excellent Rant about The Human Brain Project

This is a guest post [on a blog I am linking to, ed] by a neuroscientist who may or may not be a graduate student somewhere in Massachusetts.

You asked me about the Human Brain Project. Well, there is only one way to properly address that topic: with a rant.

Henry Markram at EPFL in Switzerland was the leader of the “Blue Brain” project, to simulate a brain (well, actually just one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain) on an IBM Blue-Gene supercomputer. He got tons of money for this project, including the IBM supercomputer for the simulations. Of course he never published anything showing that these simulations lead to any understanding of brain function whatsoever. But he did create a team of graphics professionals to make cool pictures of the simulations. Building on this “success”, he led the “Human Brain” EU flagship project into being funded by some miracle of bureaucratic gullibility. The clearly promised goal was simulating a human brain (hence the name of the project). Almost everyone in Europe publicly supported the project, although in private the neuroscientists (who, if they have done any simulations, know that the stated goal is completely absurd) would say something more like “hey, maybe it’s crazy, but it’ll bring a bunch of money.”

Now, some simple observations must be made, which are true now, and will still be true in ten years’ time, at the conclusion of this flagship project

link.

Simulating ~31,000 Neurons, .21% of a Rat's Brain Required a Supercomputer

Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry

Authors:

Markram et al

Abstract:

We present a first-draft digital reconstruction of the microcircuitry of somatosensory cortex of juvenile rat. The reconstruction uses cellular and synaptic organizing principles to algorithmically reconstruct detailed anatomy and physiology from sparse experimental data. An objective anatomical method defines a neocortical volume of 0.29 ± 0.01 mm3 containing ∼31,000 neurons, and patch-clamp studies identify 55 layer-specific morphological and 207 morpho-electrical neuron subtypes. When digitally reconstructed neurons are positioned in the volume and synapse formation is restricted to biological bouton densities and numbers of synapses per connection, their overlapping arbors form ∼8 million connections with ∼37 million synapses. Simulations reproduce an array of in vitro and in vivo experiments without parameter tuning. Additionally, we find a spectrum of network states with a sharp transition from synchronous to asynchronous activity, modulated by physiological mechanisms. The spectrum of network states, dynamically reconfigured around this transition, supports diverse information processing strategies.

Noninvasive Brain Machine Interface Demonstrated for Bionic Hand

A team of researchers from the University of Houston (UH) has developed an algorithm that enabled a man whose right hand had been amputated to grasp objects using a bionic hand controlled by his thoughts. While we've seen similar accomplishments in recent years, the new technique is non-invasive, capturing brain activity via a scalp EEG.

Research developments in recent years have given amputees much cause for hope with various thought-controlled prosthetic devices. Some have relied on surgically implanted electrodes, while others make use of electrical signals from muscles (known as myoelectric control).

But Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, a neuroscientist and engineer at UH points out that such methods have their disadvantages. Surgery, particularly neurosurgery, is a risky business, while myoelectric systems require the brain activity from muscles related to the missing limb still be intact.

In an effort to avoid these problems, UH researchers attached electrodes of a 64-channel active EEG (electroencephalogram) to the scalps of five able-bodied, right-handed men and women in their 20s. These volunteers were then tasked with picking up five different objects – a soda can, a compact disc, a credit card, a small coin and a screwdriver – each intended to illustrate a different type of grasp. The data collected data was then used to create software to decode neural activity into motor signals that reconstructed the grasping movements.

The scalp EEG was then fitted to a 56-year-old man whose right hand had been amputated and a high-tech bionic hand fitted to the remaining stump. After being told to observe and visualize himself controlling the hand, he was able to grasp the various objects using his thoughts with an 80 percent success rate.

Contreras-Vidal says a delay of 50 to 90 milliseconds between the time the signals were recorded by the EEG and when the bionic hand began to grasp indicated that the brain predicted the movement, rather than reflected it.

The researchers claim this is the first time grasping has been demonstrated using EEG-based brain-machine interface (BMI) control of a multi-fingered prosthetic hand, with Contreras-Vidal saying it could lead to the development of better prosthetic devices.

link.

Claustrum: The *YOU* in Your Brain

ONE moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area.

Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.

Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises.

link.

New Scientist warning.

I was tempted to call this the seat of the soul, but...

BRAIN Project Proposals are Getting a Reality Check

Neuroscientists were over the moon in April 2013 when President Barack Obama announced a bold new initiative to study the human brain in action. But in their heady excitement, some may have forgotten to check the math in their first proposals. At least, that's the contention of a group of physicists, engineers, and neuroscientists meeting this week in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss which ideas are likely to succeed and which may fall flat.

Key to the success of the roughly $100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is crafting new tools or methods to measure neural activity either from inside or outside the brain. Unfortunately, some ideas “violated either a physical law or some very significant engineering constraint or biological constraint,” says neurophysicist Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, who helped organize the meeting, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

The goal is to have a realistic discussion of what the physical limits are, he says, so “scientists who want to make devices will not make crazy proposals,” or, “if a proposal is crazy, one could recognize it as such” and look for other ways to make the idea work.

One such “fanciful” idea is to build nanosized radios that could snuggle up to individual neurons to record and transmit information about their activity, says physicist Peter Littlewood, director of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois. But any radio small enough to be injected into the brain without causing significant harm would not be able to transmit any information out through tissue and bone, he says. Make the devices any more powerful, he adds, and they'd likely cook the surrounding brain. Another aspiration that is likely doomed is to get microscopes that probe the brain with pulses of light to penetrate much further than they already do, Mitra says. A little more than 1 mm is possible, he adds, but even 1 cm is “out of the question, since the signal to background [noise] ratio decreases exponentially with depth.”

But physicists and engineers shouldn't simply shoot down outlandish proposals—or gripe about the intrinsic messiness of the brain's biology. They should model themselves as “fancy technicians” who can help develop revolutionary tools, Littlewood says. There are precedents for such collaboration, he notes: He, Mitra, and their colleagues at Bell Labs, for example, helped develop functional magnetic resonance imaging in the 1990s.

link.

Prepare for the Vampire Baby Boomers!

Something — or some things — in the blood of young mice has the ability to restore mental capabilities in old mice, a new study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators has found.

If the same goes for humans, it could spell a new paradigm for recharging our aging brains, and it might mean new therapeutic approaches for treating dementias such as Alzheimer's disease.

In the study, to be published online May 4 in Nature Medicine, the researchers used sophisticated techniques to pin down numerous important molecular, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological changes in the brains of old mice that shared the blood of young mice.

But they also conducted a critical experiment that was far from sophisticated, said Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, the senior author of the study and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences. The scientists simply compared older mice's performance on standard laboratory tests of spatial memory after these mice had received infusions of plasma (the cell-free part of blood) from young versus old mice, or no plasma at all.

"This could have been done 20 years ago," said Wyss-Coray, who is also senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. "You don't need to know anything about how the brain works. You just give an old mouse young blood and see if the animal is smarter than before. It's just that nobody did it."

Wyss-Coray has co-founded a biotechnology company, Alkahest, to explore the therapeutic implications of the new study's findings. He serves as the director of Alkahest's scientific advisory board.

The study's lead author, Saul Villeda, PhD, now has an active lab of his own as a faculty fellow in anatomy at the University of California-San Francisco. Villeda was a graduate student at Stanford and, briefly, a postdoctoral scholar under Wyss-Coray's direction when the bulk of the work was performed.

"We've shown that at least some age-related impairments in brain function are reversible. They're not final," Villeda said.

link.

Stanford Flirts With the Robopocalypse

Neurogrid: A Mixed-Analog-Digital Multichip System for Large-Scale Neural Simulations

Authors:

Benjamin et al

Abstract:

In this paper, we describe the design of Neurogrid, a neuromorphic system for simulating large-scale neural models in real time. Neuromorphic systems realize the function of biological neural systems by emulating their structure. Designers of such systems face three major design choices: 1) whether to emulate the four neural elements—axonal arbor, synapse, dendritic tree, and soma—with dedicated or shared electronic circuits; 2) whether to implement these electronic circuits in an analog or digital manner; and 3) whether to interconnect arrays of these silicon neurons with a mesh or a tree network. The choices we made were: 1) we emulated all neural elements except the soma with shared electronic circuits; this choice maximized the number of synaptic connections; 2) we realized all electronic circuits except those for axonal arbors in an analog manner; this choice maximized energy efficiency; and 3) we interconnected neural arrays in a tree network; this choice maximized throughput. These three choices made it possible to simulate a million neurons with billions of synaptic connections in real time—for the first time—using 16 Neurocores integrated on a board that consumes three watts.

Myelin's a Basal Characteristic of Neurons, More Derved Have Less

Harvard neuroscientists have made a discovery that turns 160 years of neuroanatomy on its head.

Myelin, the electrical insulating material long known to be essential for the fast transmission of impulses along the axons of nerve cells, is not as ubiquitous as thought, according to a new work lead by Professor Paola Arlotta of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the University's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, in collaboration with Professor Jeff Lichtman, of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

"Myelin is a relatively recent invention during evolution," says Arlotta. "It's thought that myelin allowed the brain to communicate really fast to the far reaches of the body, and that it has endowed the brain with the capacity to compute higher level functions." In fact, loss of myelin is a feature of a number of devastating diseases, including multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

But the new research shows that despite myelin essential roles in the brain, "some of the most evolved, most complex neurons of the nervous system have less myelin than older, more ancestral ones" Arlotta, co-director of the HSCI neuroscience program, says.

What this means, Arlotta says, is that the higher in the cerebral cortex one looks – the closer to the top of the brain, which is its most evolved region - the less myelin one finds. Not only that, but "neurons in this part of the brain display a brand new way of positioning myelin along their axons that has not been previously seen. They have 'intermittent myelin' with long axon tracts that lack myelin interspersed among myelin-rich segments.

link.

Monkey Controlling Monkey via Remote Control

Neuroscientists from Harvard University have put a whole new spin on the age-old saying “monkey see, monkey do,” after their brain implants allowed one monkey to control the actions of another monkey. Their findings could someday allow paralyzed individuals to control movement of their own limbs.

[...]

To accomplish the feat, scientists placed electrodes in the brain of a puppet-master rhesus monkey, while a sedated avatar monkey had electrodes wired to its spinal chord. A computer decoded the brain activity of the master and sent signals to the avatar’s spinal cord, whose hand was placed on a joystick controlling a cursor on the master’s screen.

The master monkey controlled the movement of the cursor by moving the avatar’s hand, and was rewarded each time he moved the cursor onto a target. In 98 percent of tests, the master could correctly control the avatar’s arm.

link.

Paper link.

Key to the Human Brain

Working Memory and how it Works

Healing Spinal Injuries in a Rat in a Heretical Method

The EU-USA "Brain Race"

In a spartan office looking across Lake Geneva to the French Alps, Henry Markram is searching for a suitably big metaphor to describe his latest project. "It's going to be the Higgs boson of the brain, a Noah's archive of the mind," he says. "No, it's like a telescope that can span all the way across the universe of the brain from the micro the macro level."

We are talking about the Human Brain Project, Markram's audacious plan to build a working model of the human brain - from neuron to hemisphere level - and simulate it on a supercomputer within the next 10 years. When Markram first unveiled his idea at a TEDGlobal conference in Oxford four years ago, few of his peers took him seriously.

The brain was too complex, they said, and in any case there was no computer fast enough. Even last year when he presented a more detailed plan at a scientific meeting in Bern, showing how the requisite computer power would be available by 2020, many neuroscientists continued to insist it could not be done and dismissed his claims as hype.

Today, thanks to the largesse of the European Union, which awarded Markram euros 1bn last year to make his dream a reality, many of those naysayers are being forced to take him seriously. The gift, which comes on top of a state-of-the-art IBM Blue Gene computer from the Swiss government, makes Markram's unit at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne the biggest dog on the neuro block. It also gives Markram a headstart on brain-mapping projects in Japan and the US, where Barack Obama is hoping to persuade Congress to award $3bn to a similar initiative called Brain (so far Obama has pledged $100m).

link.

Earliest Known Complete Nervous System Found in Cambrian Megacheiran Fossil

Research led by University of Arizona Regents' Professor Nick Strausfeld and London Natural History Museum's Greg Edgecombe has revealed that the ancestors of chelicerates (spiders, scorpions and their kin) branched off from the family tree of other arthropods – including insects, crustaceans and millipedes – more than half a billion years ago.

The team discovered the earliest known complete nervous system exquisitely preserved in the fossilized remains of a never-before described creature that crawled or swam in the ocean 520 million years ago.

Described in the current issue of the journal Nature, the find belongs to an extinct group of marine arthropods known as megacheirans (Greek for "large claws") and solves the long-standing mystery of where this group fits in the tree of life.

"We now know that the megacheirans had central nervous systems very similar to today's horseshoe crabs and scorpions," said the senior author of the study, Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents' Professor in the University of Arizona's department of neuroscience. "This means the ancestors of spiders and their kin lived side by side with the ancestors of crustaceans in the Lower Cambrian."

The scientists identified the 3-centimeter-long creature (a little over an inch) unearthed from the famous Chengjiang formation near Kunming in southwest China, as a representative of the extinct genus Alalcomenaeus. Animals in this group had an elongated, segmented body equipped with about a dozen pairs of body appendages enabling the animal to swim or crawl or both. All featured a pair of long, scissor-like appendages attached to the head, most likely for grasping or sensory purposes, which gave them their collective name, megacheirans.

link.

Zac Vawter: A Step (!) Closer to SFnal Cyborgism

Thanks to the first-ever mind-controlled prosthetic leg, a 32-year-old amputee is one bionic step closer to walking like normal, according to a study published this week.

The prosthetic leg bends and moves much like the average leg. More impressive is the fact that it performs these motions with only the wearer’s thoughts. The test pilot in this case, a software engineer named Zac Vawter, lost his leg in a motorcycle accident a few years ago.

Though mind-controlled prosthetic arms have been successful in people, this is the first such lower limb. Unlike many prosthetics today, like running blades, its movement doesn’t rely on a spring-like response. This allows Vawter to more easily transition between different movements like standing up, walking, or climbing stairs, and improves upon the earlier prototype we covered in November when Vawter used it to climb the 103-story Willis Tower.

The researchers rewired the severed nerves (those connected to muscles below the amputated knee) to Vawter’s still-intact hamstring muscle. This redirected his brain’s movement messages to sensors in the prosthetic. These sensors communicate with a computer to translate the nerve messages to actual movements of the robotic leg.

A Look at the Flynn Effect

First Brain to Brain Interface Created: Prof Controls College's Arms

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."

The researchers captured the full demonstration on video recorded in both labs. The version available at the end of this release has been edited for length.

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing (BCI) in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in BCI technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the "fire" button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

LINK!

SFnal Moment: Activating a Memory in the Brain of a Mouse