People who have lost their ability to speak still have active speech centers in their brain. Seeking to tap into the neurons firing in those centers, researchers at Boston University implanted a series of electrodes into the brain of Erik Ramsey, a man who has been in a locked in state since a brain stem injury when he was 16.

Of course, the electrodes are only there to pick up neuronal activity, so the researchers have had to come up with complex software to decode the raw signals into speech — in other words, to translate Ramsey's thoughts about speaking into actual sounds:

The software is designed to translate neural activity into what are known as formant frequencies, the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract. For example, if your mouth is open wide and your tongue is pressed to the base of the mouth, a certain sound frequency is created as air flows through, based on the position of the vocal musculature. Different muscle positioning creates a different frequency. Guenther trained the computer to recognize patterns of neural signals linked to specific movements of the mouth, jaw, and lips. He then translated these signals into the correlating sound frequencies and programmed a sound synthesizer to project these frequencies back out through a speaker in audio form.

So far, the technique's worked, albeit slowly. With a lot of concentration, Ramsey has been able to get the system to make all of the vowel sounds in the English language. But there are only a handful of those — the next stop is the hundreds of consonants, which could take years and a new, more sophisticated implant that can better understand what it is Ramsey is trying to say.

Source: Technology Review

Image, University of Pennsylvania

According to Scientific American's article on the study, taking psilocybin may help addicts get over their dependencies:

"It does sound counterintuitive," Griffiths says. But, "six of the 12 AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] steps are related to a higher power and surrendering to it. Many people don't engage fully into the 12-step program because they don't have a connection to a higher power. One can't help but wonder whether an experience like this might be useful."

Griffiths admits a lot more study is needed before alcoholics start dropping tabs, but he's hoping his research will help lift the taboo on what is still an illegal drug.

Source: SciAm, Associated Press

*Of course the other third experienced "significant fear" according to Griffiths, which we can take to mean they thought they were oranges and tried to peel their own skin off.

From therapy to drug addiction, humans try just about anything to beat depression, so it figures that the first hardware hack for the brain would try to put smiles on our faces. But instead of piping in porn, the pacemaker uses electrode to fire low-voltage juice into the mood and anxiety centers in your brain, rewiring your neurons to take you to happy land.

The method used is called deep-brain stimulation, and it's been around for a few years, but it's still an experimental technology. So yeah, statements like this one from Dr. Ali Rezai chief of the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Neurologic Restoration are pretty exciting: "We're rewiring the brain in many ways," he says.

But the researchers admit they're still working out the kinks in things like which brain areas are best to stimulate, and how much electrical prodding those areas need. So if you're not debilitated with depression, you might wait a few years before lining up for surgery for your very own happiness implant.

Source: Associated Press

Oxytocin is a chemical associated with many of the "pleasurable" feelings you have, from basic trust, to love and orgasm. Researchers in Switzerland theorized that people playing social trust games might change their behaviors if given doses of oxytocin, since the chemical might artificially enhance their willingness to trust someone. Indeed, they were right: subjects dosed with Oxytocin were willing to trust people even after they'd been explicitly told that those people had behaved in untrustworthy ways in the past. People who had not been dosed did not trust the "untrustworthy" people.

According to a release from Neuron:

In their experiments, the researchers asked volunteer subjects to play two types of games—a trust game and a risk game. In the trust game, subjects were asked to contribute money, with the understanding that a human trustee would invest the money and decide whether to return the profits, or betray the subjects' trust and keep all the money. In the risk game, the subjects were told that a computer would randomly decide whether their money would be repaid or not.

The subjects also received doses of either the brain chemical oxytocin (OT) or a placebo via nasal spray. They chose OT because studies by other researchers had shown that OT specifically increases people's willingness to trust others.

During the games, the subjects' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This common analytical technique involves using harmless magnetic fields and radio waves to map blood flow in brain regions, which reflects brain activity.

The researchers found that—in the trust game, but not the risk game—OT reduced activity in two brain regions: the amygdala, which processes fear, danger and possibly risk of social betrayal; and an area of the striatum, part of the circuitry that guides and adjusts future behavior based on reward feedback.

Baumgartner and colleagues concluded that their findings showed that oxytocin affected the subjects' responses specifically related to trust . . . "If subjects face social risks, such as in the trust game, those who received placebo respond to the feedback with a decrease in trusting behavior while subjects with OT demonstrate no change in their trusting behavior although they were informed that their interaction partners did not honor their trust in roughly 50% of the cases."

Brain's Trust Machinery Identified [Eurekalert]

Medgadget has the news:

All of the studies being presented used the Medtronic DBS system to stimulate a target within the brain called the ventral anterior limb of the internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS), which is a central node in the neural circuits that regulate mood and anxiety.

"The data we are presenting on 43 patients is the result of more than 10 years of work across multiple institutions worldwide. These data represent the largest number and the longest evaluation of patients with psychiatric disorders who have undergone DBS implants, including some with long-term follow up," said [Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon] Dr. Ali Rezai, who represented an international working group of physicians studying DBS therapy for treatment resistant OCD and depression. "While OCD and depression treatment with DBS require additional clinical evaluation research, our early open-label experience to date is encouraging and indicates that DBS may help severely disabled and suffering patients who have exhausted other treatment options."

Deep Brain Stimulation Useful for Severe Depression and OCD [Medgadget]

Last year, Ricard told The Independent that he hasn't had sex since he was 30, but that he still loves football. And the only time he's really gotten mad in the past few decades was when somebody threw flour on his laptop as a joke.

Meanwhile, the researchers at the University of Wisconsin say they can measure anyone's happiness levels by registering the amount of electrical activity in their right frontal cortex. Happy serenity is associated with activity in that region, while depression is associated with activity in the left frontal cortex. Apparently, according to The Independent:

Out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers' results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him - a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis.

Is it really possible that measuring happiness is as simple as monitoring electrical activity in a general region of your brain?

Sources: The Independent, and University of Wisconsin's Lab for Affective Neuroscience

According to Discovery News:

Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. . . "This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia."

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words . . . For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently. For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

However, another possibility is that English-speakers with dyslexia might be better-suited to read and write in Chinese. And vice-versa. Teaching children both languages could be another way to foster writing ability and reading comprehension. Image via Discovery.

Dyslexia Differs by Language [Discovery News]

According to Albert Y. Hung, a staff neurologist at Mass General and co-author of the study:

These opposite effects on different types of learning are reminiscent of the mixed features of autistic patients, who may be disabled in some cognitive areas but show enhanced abilities in others. The superior learning ability of these mutant mice in a specific realm is reminiscent of human autistic savants.

Hung said that while it seems counter-intuitive that loss of an important synaptic scaffold protein would result in improved learning among the mice in this study, the absence of this protein may "trap" the mice's synapses in a more plastic state, which means the synapses are ready to respond to input but not maintain it in long-term memory. Aberrant synapse development and faulty structure of dendritic spines—tiny protrusions on the surface of neurons that receive messages from other neurons—are often associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, in humans.

Hypnosis. It's been proven (in court, no less) that hypnosis can create false memories. So you could pay a hypnotist to give you falsely happy memories of your childhood, erasing your sadistic home-ec teacher and replacing her with a friendly polar bear. You can also use hypnosis to regress yourself back to childhood (temporarily, we hope) so you can have a funner time the second time around. Just don't overshoot and regress to a past life. The best thing would be a version of the Tantalus machine from that Star Trek episode, which implants fake memories directly into your brain.

Falsify the evidence. Last fall, researchers reported that if you show people a picture of something that never happened, they start to believe it actually did. The researchers showed people doctored photos of a protest in Italy and the Tiananmen Square protests in China, and afterwards people remembered the events happening that way. In an older study, scientists showed people a picture of a child at Disney World shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. The subjects started to believe they'd met Bugs Bunny at Disney World when they were kids. Which is impossible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney character.

So in a few years when Photoshop gets way better, you may be able to pay someone to construct new family pictures for you, altering some details digitally to make your childhood seem happier. Maybe they can even be holographic and interactive, and you can display them around your home.

Take a pill. Researchers from the excitingly named Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics say that memory-erasing pills are probably not that far off. (They put out this press release to tie in with the movie Paycheck, which many people wanted to erase their memories of watching.) The tricky part would be selectively erasing the bad memories and keeping the good memories. Or maybe, like Johnny Mnemonic, you'd rather just erase your whole childhood. Then at least ignorance would be bliss.

Clone yourself. Despite what many science fiction shows and movies have told us, your clone will be a baby. So you'll be able to give your clone the perfect awesome childhood you never had. It won't be the same as fixing your own childhood, but you can have a happy one vicariously.

Change your birth order. Some psychologists claim that your birth order, whether you're the first, second or third born, alters how you remember your childhood and influences your personality traits. (First-borns are leaders, middle-borns are flexible, youngest-borns are creative.) Probably a lot of this has to do with how you experience childhood at the time. But some of it may also be retroactive, to do with how you reconstruct your childhood memories. So all you have to do is put your older siblings, or yourself, into cryogenic suspension or stasis, so that you swap ages. That will have the effect of making you the older (or younger) sibling, and may help to change how you view your childhood.

Travel in time. This is probably the hardest one to pull off at the moment. Plus, even if you could time-travel, you might have some fussy restrictions on meeting your past self. So you'd be stuck trying to find ways to fix your childhood without interacting with your young self. So you're stuck with killing everybody who was ever mean to you when you were young. But if you could get past that hurdle, you could become your own cool aunt/uncle.