Scientists in India have been researching transplanting parts of the nervous system in order to help sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease. By replicating the disease's effects in rats, they've found that transplanting nerve-cells brings back the animals' ability to learn.

The researchers at India's National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Sciences and National Centre for Biological Sciences first damaged the subiculum of the rats brain, which lead to the deterioration of the hippocampus. The shrinkage of the hippocampus during Alzheimer's disease is thought to lead to the loss of memory and learning, the most visible of disease's effects.

Once the rats had been brought to this Alzheimers-like state, the researchers took cultured lines of hippocampal cells — taken from newborn transgenic rats and cultured — and precisely injected them into the hippocampi of half the rodents. After two months, both batches of rats were run through standardized mazes. The rats that had received the injections were back to pre-damage levels of learning and recall, while those that hadn't received the transplants struggled to learn the course.

What seems to have happened is that the transplanted cells settled in an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, where they proceeded to help pump out growth factors which create an environment were neurons can grow. There was a threefold increase in neurotrophic and fibroblastic growth factor, which allowed the hippocampus to regenerate from the inflicted damage, and restored the rat's abilities to learn and remember to the level of un-damaged rats.

The implications of this research are astounding for sufferers of neurodegenerative diseases. This study is specifically designed as a precursor to further work with Alzheimer's, but altering the brain to create an environment where it can succeed in regenerating damaged components is a fascinating concept. These seedling transplants could revolutionize the way we look at repairing the brain, for a disease that effects millions.

[via APA, presented in Behavioral Neuroscience; image of rat hippocampus via University of Texas]

The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig's disease, MS, or paralysis.

The lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jerry Shih, says the program is able to perform near or at 100% accuracy for the patients. While this isn't far from the results from studies using non-invasive EEG, Shih believes that ECoG has advantages, as the scalp and skull distort the information coming from the brain, which means that ECoG has potential to be faster and more accurate. Shih also said that with EEG, "the accuracy isn't terribly great, and it takes a long time for the computer system to learn an individual's brain signals and to correctly interpret."

It is early days yet, and there are still numerous hurdles for the research. The initial study was only with two patients, but they're now on to the sixth, with plans for a wider study, to ensure that this technique is universally applicable. Shih's system does require a craniotomy, which is not a surgery to be taken on a whim; and an interpreter device is required, which must be tuned to an individual user. There is also the fact that EEG based interfaces don't require the invasive surgery, and are similarly accurate, even if they are slower and not quite as precise. So in terms of market adoption, the implant is at a disadvantage. Most people would be willing to deal with the speed loss to avoid dangerous procedures.

Shih is currently working on ensuring the method's effectiveness. He believes it could be used for controlling prosthetics as well as typing. It could also possibly be trained with images instead of letters. Imagine an item, and an image or word for it would appear on your screen.

The device could be available in as little as 5-10 years.

It's just a matter of time before this technology filters down from medical to elective, and we can all live out our cyberpunk dreams of plugging our brains directly into a computer.

Via American Epilepsy Society and Mayo Clinic

According to Computerworld:

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains . . . "We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said [Intel research scientist Dean] Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

Pomerleau is working with university researchers to "decode" human thoughts, which so far has consisted mostly of doing fMRI studies to see which parts of the brain become active when people think of certain words. Their goal is to figure out how to "read" cognitive activity so people can type with their brains instead of their fingers. I can't wait to have Intel inside my cerebral cortex, especially when I have to upgrade every 6 months. Of course eventually I'll just stop upgrading, thus consigning myself to an old age of trying to get Ubuntu running on the ancient chipset in my brain.

via Computerworld

The 1986 case of a woman addicted to stimulating herself with a brain implant is chronicled in a scientific article from Pain journal called Compulsive thalamic self-stimulation: a case with metabolic, electrophysiologic and behavioral correlates. The unnamed woman had been suffering from chronic pain (the result of an injury) for over a decade, and had tried a number of drugs to deal with it. Though she was an alcoholic, doctors prescribed opium-based painkillers to her and she had been known to take more than her recommended dose. With her history of drug addiction, it's easy to see why doctors would have imagined that a brain implant would be the best course of action for the treatment of her chronic pain. Little did they know that the woman would become addicted to that, too.

Doctors implanted an electrode deep in her thalamus (see image below).

The article explains:

Soon after insertion of the nVPL electrode, the patient noted that stimulation also produced erotic sensations. This pleasurable response was heightened by continuous stimulation at 75% maximal amplitude, frequently augmented by short bursts at maximal amplitude. Though sexual arousal was prominent, no orgasm occurred with these brief increases in stimulation intensity. Despite several episodes of paroxysmal atrial tachycardia [heart disturbance] and development of adverse behavioural and neurological symptoms during maximal stimulation, compulsive use of the stimulator developed.

At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude. At times, she implored her to limit her access to the stimulator, each time demanding its return after a short hiatus. During the past two years, compulsive use has become associated with frequent attacks of anxiety, depersonalization, periods of psychogenic polydipsia and virtually complete inactivity.

What's interesting is that this case seems to have been largely forgotten, despite occasional mentions in the popular media over the years. Meanwhile, dozens of scientific articles have been published in medical journals about thalamic stimulators as a treatment for patients suffering from tremors caused by Parkinson's disease and Tourette's syndrome. There is likely some relationship between what our unnamed addict experienced (increased loss of motor control) and these new therapies (which help minimize loss of motor control).

Some evidence has turned up that thalamic stimulators are still delivering erotic feelings. A recent article in the International Journal of Impotence Research revealed that a patient who had received a thalamic stimulator to control his Tourette's was also getting erections when he self-stimulated with the implant. And a study of thalamic implants in sea bass showed that the fish underwent a "sex color change," part of their mating process, when stimulated.

Science fiction author Larry Niven once dubbed these addicts "wireheads," but science fiction has now become science fact. As thalamic stimulators and other brain implants become more commonplace, it's likely that our anonymous implant addict will no longer be an outlier. She's just the first documented case of a new kind of addiction.

Chorost's article is about the dawning of the age of "optogenetics," a field where scientists stimulate neurons (such as those in your brain) to fire or stop firing by genetically-engineering those neurons to respond to light. Thus, optogenetics: optics plus genetics. An inserted algae gene makes neurons fire when exposed to blue light; an inserted bacterial gene stills them when they're exposed to yellow light. Imagine being able to make the neurons responsible for chronic depression or Parkinsons stop firing with the flick of a switch. That's the dream of the scientists who are working in this field.

You've probably heard about a few optogenetic experiments over the past couple of years. Chorost describes one of the more famous ones, where students got a mouse to run counterclockwise by exposing a few neurons in its brain to blue light using fiber optic wires. He writes:

The counterclockwise-running mouse was something new - a triple fusion of animal, plant, and technology - and the students knew it was a harbinger of unprecedentedly powerful ways to alter the brain. For curing diseases, to begin with, but also for understanding how the brain interacts with the body. And ultimately for fusing human and machine.

Mice with Parkinsons symptoms who underwent optogenetic treatment also saw dramatic improvement.

And Chorost is quick to point out that Parkinsons treatments are just the beginning. Optogenetics open the door for two-way traffic between computers and the human brain. He explains:

No matter how good they get, one-way prostheses can't close the loop. In theory, two-way optogenetic traffic could lead to human-machine fusions in which the brain truly interacts with the machine, rather than only giving or only accepting orders. It could be used, for instance, to let the brain send movement commands to a prosthetic arm; in return, the arm's sensors would gather information and send it back. Blue and yellow LEDs would flash on and off inside genetically altered somatosensory regions of the cortex to give the user sensations of weight, temperature, and texture. The limb would feel like a real arm. Of course, this kind of cyborg technology is not exactly around the corner. But it has suddenly leapt from the realm of wild fantasy to concrete possibility.

Of course, there are darker fantasies that lurk here too, of perfect mind control and memory suppression. Indeed, optogenetic devices could one day lead to the consumer-grade memory-eating devices in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Or to Google implants in your brain.

You have to read this mind-blowing, brilliantly-written article.

via Wired

The problem that CalTech economist Antonio Rangel and his team were grappling with was the "free-rider" problem. This occurs because people want public goods, but don't want to pay for them. So they lie about how much they value a given good such as health care or public parks. So, for example, a swimmer might benefit a great deal from a public pool. But she wants to pay as little as possible for it, so she lies about how much it will benefit her. This may not affect the public's decision to build the pool, but it could affect how much she pays for it.

Economists have long believed this is an unsolvable problem. But Rangel says fMRIs can actually force people to tell the truth about what their values are when it comes to public goods.

A release from CalTech explains the researchers' methods:

As part of this experiment, volunteers were divided up into groups. "The entire group had to decide whether or not to spend their money purchasing a good from us," [economics professor Antonio] Rangel explains. "The good would cost a fixed amount of money to the group, but everybody would have a different benefit from it."

The subjects were asked to reveal how much they valued the good. The twist? Their brains were being imaged via fMRI as they made their decision. If there was a match between their decision and the value detected by the fMRI, they paid a lower tax than if there was a mismatch. It was, therefore, in all subjects' best interest to reveal how they truly valued a good; by doing so, they would on average pay a lower tax than if they lied.

"The rules of the experiment are such that if you tell the truth," notes Krajbich, who is the first author on the Science paper, "your expected tax will never exceed your benefit from the good."

In fact, the more cooperative subjects are when undergoing this entirely voluntary scanning procedure, "the more accurate the signal is," Krajbich says. "And that means the less likely they are to pay an inappropriate tax."

This changes the whole free-rider scenario, notes Rangel. "Now, given what we can do with the fMRI," he says, "everybody's best strategy in assigning value to a public good is to tell the truth, regardless of what you think everyone else in the group is doing."

And tell the truth they did-98 percent of the time, once the rules of the game had been established and participants realized what would happen if they lied. In this experiment, there is no free ride, and thus no free-rider problem.

"If I know something about your values, I can give you an incentive to be truthful by penalizing you when I think you are lying," says Rangel.

While the readings do give the researchers insight into the value subjects might assign to a particular public good, thus allowing them to know when those subjects are being dishonest about the amount they'd be willing to pay toward that good, Krajbich emphasizes that this is not actually a lie-detector test.

"It's not about detecting lies," he says. "It's about detecting values-and then comparing them to what the subjects say their values are."

"It's a socially desirable arrangement," adds Rangel. "No one is hurt by it, and we give people an incentive to cooperate with it and reveal the truth."

"There is mind reading going on here that can be put to good use," he says. "In the end, you get a good produced that has a high value for you."

From a scientific point of view, says Rangel, these experiments break new ground. "This is a powerful proof of concept of this technology; it shows that this is feasible and that it could have significant social gains."

And this is only the beginning. "The application of neural technologies to these sorts of problems can generate a quantum leap improvement in the solutions we can bring to them," he says.

Indeed, Rangel says, it is possible to imagine a future in which, instead of a vote on a proposition to fund a new highway, this technology is used to scan a random sample of the people who would benefit from the highway to see whether it's really worth the investment. "It would be an interesting alternative way to decide where to spend the government's money," he notes.

Wait, what? The government is going to do brain scans on the public to determine what we "really" value and then tax us accordingly? Or possibly even choose which public works projects to undertake? The only place this can lead is some kind of terrifying, dystopian welfare state where the government spends more money on fMRI machines than anything else.

via CalTech

[University of California, Davis, neuroscientists] Deborah Hannula and Charan Ranganath first trained volunteers by showing them images of faces paired with background scenes. Then they ran tests in which the volunteers were shown one of the scenes, to cue their memories, followed by the same scene superimposed with three previously learned faces.

The volunteers correctly identified the face previously paired with the scene nearly two thirds of the time. But careful analysis of the volunteers' eye movements, combined with measurements of brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging, revealed that the hippocampus was often retrieving memories even if these recollections didn't make it to the level of consciousness.

Somehow the hippocampus is able to retreive memories without that acitivity making it into your conscious mind. This work suggests a number of future areas of research. First of all, could we figure out a way to make the activity of the hippocampus touch the conscious mind, and improve our memories? And second, is it possible that we're acting on unconscious memories all the time, letting them color our decisions and calling them "intuition" or "just a feeling"?

This research is forthcoming in Neuron.

Apparently when this woman had seizures, she felt that her voice had become deeper and her arms were hairy. Once, when a female friend of hers with her as a seizure came on, she thought her friend was turning into a man too. The woman had no history of mental illness, nor did she have symptoms of gender identity disorder.

After imaging her brain, the researchers discovered that she had some damage to her amygdala, and weird electrical activity in her right temporal lobe during seizures. Had they discovered some gender identity center of the brain, which when damaged results in the feeling of changing sex? Absolutely not. In fact, there is no such center in the brain.

Instead, the researchers believe that this unusual case is simply one flavor of a more general experience of self-alienation that comes during epileptic attacks.

Reports ScienceNow:

More likely, [New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky] says, the amygdala is one node in a network of brain regions essential for self-identity. When neural activity in this network goes haywire, a range of bizarre experiences can result, Devinsky says. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of feeling the presence of God in the moments preceding a seizure. More common, Devinsky says, are feelings of déjà vu or its opposite, jamais vu, the sense that a familiar environment has become unfamiliar. "In epilepsy, you can experience these intense and extreme emotions and in some cases misidentification of yourself and where you are in relation in the world," he says.

via Science Now

The Swiss scientists used a technology developed to kill uterine fibroids without surgery that an Israeli company modified for use in the brain, according to the MIT Technology Review. That company, Insightec, combined the high-intensity focused ultrasound technology used on the fribroids with CT scans and MRIs to allow doctors to focus on the part of the brain they wish to excise and see the results in real time. Eyal Zadicario, head of InSightec's neurology program, said:

You take a CT scan of the patient's head and tailor the acoustic beam to focus through the skull.

Technology Review elaborates:

The device also has a built-in cooling system to prevent the skull from overheating.

The ultrasound beams are focused on a specific point in the brain—the exact location depends on the condition being treated—that absorbs the energy and converts it to heat. This raises the temperature to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit and kills the cells in a region approximately 10 cubic millimeters in volume.

In effect, the high-intensity focused ultrasound cauterizes a specific, internal section of the brain, destroying the tissue completely.

The nine patients in the Swiss study suffered from chronic pain that couldn't be treated with medications; the ultrasound surgery successfully destroyed a small area of their thalamus, bringing relief from the pain without other, significant side effects. They hope to start testing the machine on Parkinson's patients, in an effort to bring them relief from some of the the physical side effects of that disease.

Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves [MIT Technology Review via Live Science]

While some people already think that brain-imaging lie detectors are a scam, others remain convinced that they're the wave of the future. A recent study by Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton at Harvard University shows that the skeptics might be right.

Paxton and Greene bet their subjects money based on guessing a coin flip. While those who had to record their responses in advance had average success, those who didn't have to tell their guess until after they knew the result had a high success rate, indicating they were lying. More interestingly, those people who were even interested in lying showed brain activity when just offered the opportunity to cheat, while those who were more honest showed no difference in their brain activity regardless of the opportunity to cheat. Over time, Greene and Paxton were able to predict whether certain volunteers would lie at all. They expect that their machine could be developed not just to determine whether someone was lying or had lied, but if they were interested in doing so or would in the future.

You always knew your brain would eventually betray you. The question is, how useful is this information really? Doesn't everyone want to lie sometimes, including people who are honest?

Truthfulness Requires No Act of Will for Honest People [via Harvard]

[Image via the Arnold School of Public Health]

Through education Dr. Steven C. Schlozman is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer at the Harvard School of Education. He is also an avid sci-fi and horror fan - and, apparently, the world's leading authority on the neurobiology of the living dead. He has even drafted a fake medical journal article on the zombie plague, which he calls Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, or ANSD (the article has five authors: one living, three "deceased" and one "humanoid infected").

Schlozman's foray into necro-diagnostics began when he volunteered to give a talk for the "Science on Screen" lecture series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA. He conducted extensive research by talking with George Romero and immersing himself in genre literature and memorabilia - which is why the alternate title for his lecture is "A Way Cool Tax Deduction for a Bunch of Cool Books, Action Figures and a Movie."

So yes, Schlozman's lecture is actually quite funny, and liberally sprinkled with other pop culture references including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. But the underlying science is serious. His lecture is a tour of the human brain, using the living dead as a narrative theme.

According to Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, this is your brain on zombies:

The Frontal Lobe

This part of the brain is involved with "executive functioning" - enabling us to think carefully and solve problems in an abstract way. Clearly, there's not much going on there if you have the misfortune of being afflicted with living deadness. But we do know that zombies can see us and sense us. Schlozman concludes that zombies possess just enough frontal lobe activity to "listen" to the thalamus, through which sensory input is processed.

But the frontal lobe function most relevant to understanding zombie behavior is the control of "impulsivity"-the general term for when you do something and, if you had two more seconds, you might not have done it. For instance, if in a fit of rage you have the sudden urge to punch your boss in the face, the frontal lobe intervenes and allows you to consider why that might be a bad idea.

The Amygdala and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Absent a properly functioning frontal lobe, a zombie is driven entirely by base emotions - such as rage - that are housed in the primitive parts of our brain, notably the amygdala. There's precedence for this in nature. A crocodile brain, for instance, is mostly driven by the amygdala. Researchers have confirmed this by introducing lesions into the amygdala of animal specimens: the result is a drop in the attack and retreat response that correlates significantly with the amount of damage that's done to that region of the brain. A crocodile without an amygdala isn't really a crocodile. As such, Schlozman argues, "you can't really be mad at zombies, because that's like being mad at a crocodile," adding that it's the delicate balance between frontal lobe and amygdala "that makes us human."

That balance is maintained by the anterior cingulate cortex, which modulates and dampens the excitability of the amygdala as it talks to the frontal lobe. So, when the amygdala gets all stirred up by fear, anger or lust, the anterior cingulate cortex steps on it a little bit, giving the frontal lobe time to think everything through before it sends signals toward the motor cortex and we act upon those impulses.

A zombie would have a dysfunctional anterior cingulate cortex, rendering it unable to modulate feelings of anger. The result? Hyper-aggression.

The Cerebellum and the Basal Ganglia

Science may once and for all settle the heated debate over whether "the infected" in 28 Days Later could be classified as zombies.

Schlozman says "no," observing that "the infected" possess "some sort of higher cortical function going on that allows them to hunt humans." Moreover, the fake zombies in 28 Days Later exhibit fluidity of motion. They can run, jump, climb and quickly change direction-activities that the true Romero zombies are incapable of performing.

Clearly, zombies suffer from cerebellar and basal ganglia dysfunction (duh!). Those are the parts of the brain that make fluidity of motion possible. The basal ganglia helps us with coordinated movement. The cerebellum helps us with balance. In fact, if you visit the website of the National Institutes of Health and read about cerebellar degeneration (such as ataxia), the symptoms match the familiar gait of the living dead: "a wide-legged, unsteady, lurching walk, usually accompanied by a back and forth tremor in the trunk of the body…"

Mirror Neurons

This is recent, cutting-edge research in the field of neuroscience. Schlozman describes mirror neuron theory as a "neurobiological model for empathy, which suggests, in a very hopeful way, that we might be wired to connect with one another." Regions of the brain are recruited in response to social interactions in which we watch and thus experience the experiences of the "other."

As a press release issued by the European Science Foundation explains it: in

Just as the same mirror neurons fire when observing and doing certain tasks, so other mirror neurons may be triggered both when experiencing a particular emotion and when observing someone else with that emotion.

But, Schlozman asks, what if the things we're fighting have brains that are incapable of connecting? In response, we disconnect from each other. Schlozman quotes a veteran of the Battle of Yonkers in the book World War Z: "Shock and Awe! But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't?"

At the Battle of Yonkers, the humans hit the zombie horde with everything they've got. But the zombies keep coming. They don't look scared. They don't look excited. They don't look enraged. And that actually freaks out the humans more than anything else, prompting the humans to turn on each other.

Schlozman suggests that mirror neurons also help explain the popularity of the zombie genre among the living. While watching these movies, "we like the permission to look at these things that look human - but aren't human - and have utter and complete permission to blow their heads off." In other words, we get off on the thrill of guiltless violence. We enjoy a brief vacation from empathy, and take our crocodile brains out for a spin.

By way of example, I came across an interview with actor Mike Christopher Berhosky, who played the iconic Hare Krishna zombie in the 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead. Berhosky describes the audience reaction to the film's screening:

I got bashed in the head and everyone CHEERED. Took the wind right outta' my sails. Everyone hated the Hare Krishna devotees for their incessant pestering and swarming them at the airports and such….Killing off my character had the effect of releasing a lot of pent up frustration….bashing in the Hare Krishna zombie's head was much more than getting rid of another pesky zombie…it was VENGEANCE.

But the fun lasts only up to a point. As the movies progress, Schlozman says, we start to feel uncomfortable with the loss of our humanity-that we are "so willing to forsake those mirror neurons."

The Ventromedial Hypothalamus

In the movies, zombies are always hungry, no matter how many supporting actors they consume. The most likely explanation is that zombies don't have a properly functioning ventromedial hypothalamus: the region of the brain that lets you know whether you've eaten enough. The result is hyperphagia. Zombies will eat and eat and eat, but never feel satiated.

That raises a slightly awkward question: If zombies are constantly eating, then how come they never poop?

Schlozman doesn't know for sure, but he has at least one promising theory: Maybe the living dead are constipated.

Now we know why zombies are always moaning.

Mark Strauss is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.

Some aspects of peoples' cognitive skills – such as the ability to make rapid comparisons, remember unrelated information and detect relationships – peak at about the age of 22, and then begin a slow decline starting around age 27.

"This research suggests that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," said Timothy Salthouse, a University of Virginia professor of psychology and the study's lead investigator . . .

Many of the participants in Salthouse's study were tested several times during the course of years, allowing researchers to detect subtle declines in cognitive ability.

Top performances in some of the tests were accomplished at the age of 22. A notable decline in certain measures of abstract reasoning, brain speed and in puzzle-solving became apparent at 27.

Salthouse found that average memory declines can be detected by about age 37. However, accumulated knowledge skills, such as improvement of vocabulary and general knowledge, actually increase at least until the age of 60.

So you'd better hurry up and get all your good thinking done before you turn 30, at which point you'll have to go to Carousel anyway, so it won't matter what state your brain is in.

via Eurekalert

Medgadet has the story:

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin - the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

[UCLA neurologist Paul Thompson] and his colleagues scanned the brains of 23 sets of identical twins and 23 sets of fraternal twins. Since identical twins share the same genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes, the researchers were able to compare each group to show that myelin integrity was determined genetically in many parts of the brain that are key for intelligence. These include the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial reasoning, visual processing and logic, and the corpus callosum, which pulls together information from both sides of the body.

The researchers used a faster version of a type of scanner called a HARDI (high-angular resolution diffusion imaging) - think of an MRI machine on steroids - that takes scans of the brain at a much higher resolution than a standard MRI . . . HARDI tracks how water diffuses through the brain's white matter - a way to measure the quality of its myelin.

"HARDI measures water diffusion," said Thompson, who is also a member of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging. "If the water diffuses rapidly in a specific direction, it tells us that the brain has very fast connections. If it diffuses more broadly, that's an indication of slower signaling, and lower intelligence. So it gives us a picture of one's mental speed," he said.

via Medgadget

Over at Wired, Quinn Norton has just published a series of articles that take you on an in-depth tour of the nascent science of neuroengineering. You and I can just call it "brain hacking," because that's what it is. The scientists that Norton interviews are literally rewiring mouse brains and sticking devices into them that instigate new behaviors. (See video.) They've mastered the technique of causing neurons in mouse brains to fire when they want them to, which means they can literally make a mouse decide to turn to the left just by hitting a button.

How do they do it? By using viruses to insert two foreign genes into the mouse brain: one that causes neurons to fire when exposed to blue light, and one that causes neurons to go silent when exposed to yellow light. These new genes integrate themselves seamlessly into the mouse neurons, essentially adding a light switch to neural impulses. As Norton explains:

Then there's the matter of getting the right colors of light past the skull and into the precise spot to be controlled. All of this means Deisseroth's team has to open up the mouse's head surgically, apply the virus to the desired area, then feed in a fiber optic cable that will continue to protrude out of the mouse's head after the surgery has healed up. Then they attach the fiber optic cable to lasers that can pump in the precise frequencies of light needed to control the cells.

Once it's done, though, they have absolute control over the section of the brain involved. Fed into the left motor cortex, the area that controls movement, it could make someone dance to the right. Fed into the pleasure center of the brain, it could make someone happy with the press of a button.

It's hard to tell if a mouse is happy, but attaching this system to its motor cortex makes a dramatic demo. Deisseroth, who is still developing this technology at Stanford, plays the video of a mouse wandering around its container. The fiber optic cable leading into its brain is barely visible until someone turns on the blue light. Then the animal runs to the left in large, almost perfectly circular loops. "You've got to wonder what he's is thinking," Deisseroth muses. "It's 'I gotta go left, I gotta go left.'"

Read more about this at Wired.

Imagine what will come next, when these devices get less crude and are wired into people's pleasure and reward systems. That's exactly what Norton asks in a follow-up article on dialing up happiness.

Devised at the University of Toronto to aid children who cannot move or speak, the infrared scanner picks up brain patterns involved in very simple preference - such as which kind of soda you would like to drink. A paper on the device was published this week in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

According to the University of Toronto:

Wearing a headband fitted with fibre-optics that emit light into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, [test subjects] were shown two drinks on a computer monitor, one after the other, and asked to make a mental decision about which they liked more.

"When your brain is active, the oxygen in your blood increases and depending on the concentration, it absorbs more or less light," [researcher Sheena] Luu said. "In some people, their brains are more active when they don't like something, and in some people they're more active when they do like something."

After teaching the computer to recognize the unique pattern of brain activity associated with preference for each subject, the researchers accurately predicted which drink the participants liked best 80 per cent of the time.

The device functions by measuring patterns of near-infrared light absorption into brain tissues. Luu added that the device can only work for simple preference decisions, and that the brain is far too complex for the device to read thoughts that go beyond "I would prefer this chair to that chair." She hopes the device, when perfected, will help fully paralyzed people express preferences in their daily lives.

SOURCES:

University of Toronto

Journal of Neural Engineering

While I enjoy the overarching conspiracy plot in Fringe with the Pattern and Massive Dynamic, I think some of the best episodes are devoted to what sometimes derisively get called "monsters of the week." If you can come up with a weekly monster that's cool enough, it makes for excellent television (as X-Files and Supernatural have demonstrated many times over). And this week's monster, a 657-megabyte file that liquifies people's brains, was creepy and funny all at once.

We begin by watching an unwary teen clicking on a pop-up window that appears on his computer bearing the words "What's that noise? Click here." I swear clicking on a pop-up has become the "opening the door to strangers in hockey masks" of the 2000s. Why does the kid do it??? I think basically so that we can watch the weird images and remember the movies The Ring and Videodrome with great satsifaction.

After the kid's brain is liquified by the file, several other people suffer the same fate. But not before Walter can revel in cups of liquid brain and Olivia can once again tangle with evil internal investigations white dude Harris. Also, my prediction last week that Olivia's visiting sister and niece would be in danger came true immediately. The third near-victim of the evil pop-up was Olivia's niece, who barely avoided sneezing her brains out of her nose.

Unlike most of our bad guys, this week's monster-maker wasn't part of the Pattern or some other vast underground science conspiracy. He was just an out-of-work hacker with a vendetta against people he thought had wronged him: A boss who fired him, an ex-wife, and a used car salesman whose death wasn't ever explained (or was it? did I miss something?). He's invented this multimedia file that contains some kind of hand-wavey audio component that vibrates on a frequency that makes brains literally fry. Which doesn't explain why people are only affected if they LOOK at the file, since it would seem that all they'd have to do is hear it. But don't worry about that, because Walter is making funny jokes about Darwin and syphilis.

Olivia and the scoobies easily track our file-sharing killer to his (of course) underground warehouse lab lair. This is thanks in part to yet another underground science friend of Peter's who says things about megabytes and didn't seem to know about Google maps.

The pacing and gory brain stuff were terrific - this was a simple whodunnit episode done well. Perhaps the biggest flaw here was the slightly tedious rehashing of the conflict between Olivia and Harris from last week. Harris is some DHS mucky-muck who Olivia once helped to jail for sexually assaulting women. Now he's on a vendetta against her and the whole Fringe division, which he keeps saying is a "misallocation of FBI resources" for reasons he never really articulates. He says the division is "rogue" despite the fact that they always solve their cases and seem to be working within the FBI. Anyway, he spent a lot of time telling Olivia that she sucked, and she had to make her frowny face while ignoring him.

Towards the end of the episode, Olivia's boss Broyles finally steps in and tells Harris that if he fights Olivia he's fighting Broyles - there's going to be a three-letter-agency manager smackdown. I must confess that this whole subplot is a little boring and feels like a red herring. Harris isn't part of the Pattern and his character is so two-dimensional that he might as well live in the book Flatland. Get rid of him already and give us more menacing Massive Dynamic or Jones or something.

A subplot that did actually work in the episode was Walter confronting his past. The mother of Walter's former lab assistant gets into contact with him so that she can get some closure on how her daughter died: In a fire that started in Walter's old lab. Peter resists letting her see Walter, imagining that it will send the old mad scientist into a tailspin or breakdown. But Olivia convinces Peter to let Walter face up to his pre-insane asylum past, and we get a pretty touching scene where Walter talks to the grieving woman about her daughter. Then Peter gets drunk and goes over to Olivia's house to do his smokin' Pacey routine and say he's sorry.

I'll bet you a dime bag that he's going to wind up dating Olivia's sister. That's my guess.

Until next week, kids, ferchrissake don't click on a goddamn pop-up window.

Scientists have long searched for a common ancestor of all animals, suggesting perhaps that sponges might be it. But now the sponge has lost its status as mother of us all. A new study published today in PLoS Biology makes a compelling argument that the Placozoa phylum of multicellular animals (which includes our Trichoplax above) is our ur-ancestor. A research team led by Bernd Schierwater did an exhaustive analysis of everything from known animal body types to mitochondrial DNA in as many species as possible. And they now believe that this simple Trichoplax, with no muscles or brain, may be our earliest progenitor.

The Trichoplax is already an intriguing creature - it was only discovered 100 years ago. But what's even more intriguing is what it tells us about brains. Schierwater and his team believe that the brainless Trichoplax is the ur-animal that came before we divided up into lower and higher animals. What that means, according to the researchers, is that brains and nervous systems evolved twice: once in the higher animals (that's us and other complex creatures) and once in the lower animals (like snails or worms). It also means that higher and lower animals were evolving at the same time.

In their paper, the researchers write:

We conclude that the higher animals (Bilateria) and lower animals (diploblasts), probably separated very early, at the very beginning of metazoan animal evolution and independently evolved their complex body plans, including body axes, nervous system, sensory organs, and other characteristics. The striking similarities in several complex characters (such as the eyes) resulted from both lineages using the same basic genetic tool kit, which was already present in the common ancestor.

They say that such a double-evolution was possible because the Placazoans already contained a genetic "tool kit" with genes that coded for a nervous system.

The research also makes it sound as if most animal life on Earth tends to evolve towards creatures with brains.

SOURCES:

"Concatenated Analysis Sheds Light on Early Metazoan Evolution and Fuels a Modern “Urmetazoon” Hypothesis" via PLoS Biology

"A New Look at Some Old Animals" via PLos Biology

"Scientists Zero in on Earth's Original Animal" via Live Science

A group of researchers in France and Italy have published a paper today in Nature Nanotechnology that carbon nanotubes can act as neural workarounds in the brain, forming tight contacts with the already-existing nerve cells and conducting electricity between them exactly the way neurons do with each other.

According to Henry Markram, a lead scientist on the project at Laboratory of Neural Microcircuitry in Switzerland:

The new carbon nanotube-based interface technology discovered together with state of the art simulations of brain-machine interfaces is the key to developing all types of neuroprosthetics — sight, sound, smell, motion, vetoing epileptic attacks, spinal bypasses, as well as repairing and even enhancing cognitive functions.

If we use technologies like this to cure Alzheimer's patients, we may wind up with a generation of hyper-intelligent seniors ready to invent the next brain-boosting technology.

SOURCE: EPFL

Image of carbon nanotubes via Nanolab.

Using an fMRI brain scanner, researchers read electrical signals coming from people's brains while they thought about letters in the word "neuron." The research team led by Yukiyaso Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs has designed software that can process the output of the fMRI and search for signals associated with vision. (Many of the same parts of the brain that process images in the real world are also used to create images in your mind's eye.)

Once they'd processed the signals they received, researchers were able to recreate the word "neuron" from what they'd picked up in subject's brains.

A representative from the research center said:

By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.

Obviously we have a long way to go before that. But it's an interesting idea, and one that's been exploited a lot in science fiction scenarios where devices like these are used to capture images from people's memories. Given that fMRI scans are already being used as evidence in courtrooms, could scans of images in people's brains be far behind?

Visual Image Reconstruction From Brain Activity [via Neuron]

Though it is often difficult to tell when somebody with locked in syndrome is fully conscious, a team of doctors led by Frank Guenther of Boston University strongly suspected that the man was aware and longed to speak. They put their patient in an fMRI brain scanner and asked him to attempt to make vowel sounds. His brain showed the exact same patterns as an uninjured person making those sounds aloud.

So they knew his brain's speech centers were still functioning. They just needed a way to connect those speech centers to a speech synthesizer - an artificial mouth if you will. Researchers implanted a special kind of electrode in his brain, one that's "impregnated with neurotrophic factors" that encourage brain neurons to grow into and around the electrode. Essentially this electrode forms a very strong connection with brain neurons, which results in a strong signal that reliably comes from the same part of the patient's brain over time.

Over a period of weeks, Guenther and his team worked to decode the signals coming from the man's brain. Eventually, he was able "to produce three vowel sounds with good accuracy," said Guenther. The man produces these sounds as quickly as he would normal speech, and Guenther added, "The long-term goal within five years is to have him use the speech brain–computer interface to produce words directly."

According to Nature:

Their efforts are appreciated by the patient too. "When we first arrived to install this system he was obviously very excited — you can tell from his involuntary movements, and he was trying to look at us the whole time," Guenther says. As the man's father told the team, "he really has a new lease on life".

The team's next step is to train their computer decoder to recognize consonants so that patients can form whole words, and even sentences. They also hope that with developments in technology, they can implant more electrodes in their next patient to transmit a more detailed signal.

Other researchers are working on less-invasive techniques to achieve the same goal for other paralyzed patients. Their brain-computer interfaces sit on the outside of the skull, so there's no need to put an electrode into the brain itself.

Brain Implant Allows Mute Man to Speak [via Nature]

Image via Getty.