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

A Duke University study, conducted on November 4th, 2008, measured voters' testosterone levels before and after the winner was announced. Participants were asked to chew a piece of gum at 8pm, when the polls in North Carolina closed, and then again at 11:30pm after Obama's election was announced. By analyzing the spit samples in the gum, the researchers were able to analyze the testosterone levels of the participants.

Men generally experienced a slight drop in testosterone over the course of the night, but the participants who voted for Obama did not experience a drop in testosterone. Male voters who voted for McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr, however, experienced a significantly greater drop in testosterone than would be expected. Female voters did not show a significant change in testosterone, regardless of whom they voted for.

Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar was excited by the indication that voters are physiologically so affected by election outcomes, and plans to perform a similar experiment involving sports instead of politics. He figures studying Duke basketball fans is a good place to start.

[Physorg]

A team led by Gero Miesenbock of the University of Oxford has been working to identify and manipulate brain cells linked to associative learning, where an animal learns to associate a certain cue with a specific outcome. There are just 12 cells in the fly brain linked with associative learning.

To determine which cells are associated with bad memories, the researchers sought to trigger those cells and, at the same time release an odor. If the fly avoided the odor in the future, they new that they had successfully rewritten the fly's memory to associate that odor with a bad experience.

They modified neurons in the flies' brains by adding a receptor that is activated by ATP. They then injected the brains with ATP placed inside a light-activated cage. They then targeted a laser at the appropriate cells, causing the release of the ATP and activating the receptors. At the same time they flashed the laser, the researchers released the odor.

Sure enough, when presented with two odors placed at equal distances from the flies, the flies who had received the laser flash avoided the odor they had been programmed to associate with bad memories. The flies effective "remembered" that something bad was associated with the smell, even though they had never experienced it themselves.

And Miesenbock believes that this could have implications for human brains as well. Researchers may be just understanding how animals learn from and adapt to mistakes, but he has every expectation that the mechanism for humans will be, on a fundamental level, the same as the mechanism for flies.

Bad memories written with lasers [BBC]

In the most recent issue of Neuron, Jack Gallant and Thomas Naselaris of the University of California, Berkeley describe their process for reconstructing images from brain scans. While previous studies have used fMRI technology to identify an image a subject has recently viewed, those studies involve a subject viewing a specific picture from a limited set and then showing them all the pictures in that set to see which one they previously viewed. Gallant and Naselaris' research is focused on reconstructing visual information based solely on readings from the brain.

The researchers have worked on identifying which parts of the brain are associated with certain types of visual information. For example, different regions are active when viewing a face or a crowd of people or a building. They believe as their understanding of these regions grow more sophisticated, they will better be able to pin point from fMRI scans what a subject has seen. Currently, they are able to get a rough idea of what a subject is looking at and then pull a corresponding image from a vast database of images. It's not quite a reconstruction yet, but it is close and will improve with further research.

An article from Wired notes that full visual reconstruction is still decades away, but could have implications for devices that read dreams or machines controlled through thought. However, as fMRI technology is so often used now in court cases (arguably prematurely given the current technology), it seems likely that one of the first applications we could see from this technology will be in justice system.

[Wired]

The report, published by Alzheimer's Disease International, is based on research carried out by a team led by Professor Martin Prince from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. It predicts that 35 million people will suffer from dementia by 2010, but that that figure will rise to 65.7 million by 2030, and then to upwards of 115 million by 2050, and calls upon the World Health Organization to make dementia a priority for research, in the hopes of lessening pressure on sufferers and caregivers, according to Marc Wortmann, ADI's executive director:

The crisis of dementia and Alzheimer's can no longer be ignored. Unchecked Alzheimer's will impose enormous burdens on individuals, families, healthcare infrastructures and the global economy... There is hope yet, if action is taken now to fund improvements in dementia care services, and to increase investment in research.

Dementia cases to double in next 20 years, say researchers [Guardian.co.uk]

Psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia have been studying the effects of reading on cognitive functions. They had one group of subject read Franz Kafka's short story "The Country Doctor," a strange and surreal tale, and had a second group read the same story, but structured in a way that made more traditionally logical sense to readers. After reading the story, the subjects were then given a grammar learning test in which they were asked to identify patterns within strings of letters.

Subjects who read the original Kafka story identified more letter strings than those who read the more logically structured version, and were actually more accurate in their identifications, suggesting that they had better learned the patterns. The researchers believe that, in reading a story without a readily identifiable logic or structure, the subjects' brains began actively looking for patterns:

"You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," [study co-author Travis] Proulx said. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviours, but either way, they want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

The rub, though, is that the surreal experience must be unexpected to get the desired cognitive boost. Going in knowing you are going to read a strange and surreal story might not have the same effect.

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study [Guardian]

[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.

In a paper published in this month's Neuroscience, philosopher Adam Shriver suggested that genetically engineering cows to feel no pain could be an acceptable alternative to eliminating factory farming. And some neuroscientists are on their way to making Shriver's suggestion a very real possibility. Zhou-Feng Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University, has been working on identifying the genes that "affective" pain, the unpleasantness associated with painful sensations. Chen and his team have identified a gene called P311, and have found that mice who lack P311 do not have negative associations with pain, although they do react negatively to heat and pressure. Chen believes that, with the removal of the same P311 gene, livestock like pigs and cows could be engineered to feel no pain.

So what are the ethicists saying? Peter Singer, the famed bioethicist and author of Animal Liberation, has often advocated vegetarianism and veganism to avoid animal suffering, but says if livestock could be bred to feel no pain, he would not take issue with the cruelty aspect of factory farming. However Singer, and other ethicists note that, even with pain-free meat, the environmental impact of factory farming cannot be ignored.

Pain-free animals could take suffering out of farming [New Scientist]

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

Specifically, dopamine is responsible for making you remember frightening experiences in the long term, rather than forgetting them right away.

Researchers studied the effect of dopamine on rats who had been terrified by having their paws electrically shocked. What the scientists discovered was that dopamine had no affect on the rats' memories if it was given shortly after the shock. But if the rats were given chemicals that reduced the amount of dopamine absorbed by their neurons about 12 hours later - roughly the time it takes for the brain to consolidate long-term memories - they forgot the painful experience quickly and walked right onto the foot-shocking device again. However, rats who received chemicals 12 hours later that enhanced the amount of dopamine absorbed remembered the foot-shocking device far longer than they might have otherwise. Their fear of foot shock remained quite vivid.

Let this be a lesson to all authoritarian regimes who want to rule with fear and drugs. Feed your population with dopamine promoters 12 hours after the public executions. Their terror and awe will last a lot longer, and you'll get a bigger bang for each buck you pay your death squads.

via Science

A team led by Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists Nipun Misraa and Julio A. Martinez worked on the discovery, and their results were published earlier this week in PNAS. According to a release about the research:

[The researchers] created a biomechanical hybrid in which nanowires are coated in a lipid bilayer-the same type of membrane that envelopes cells and controls the passage of molecules in and out of the cell. The authors incorporated gated channels in this membrane, and used molecular transport through these channels to trigger an electric signal. The researchers show that the nanowire circuit can be used to make the channels open and close as they would in a biological cell. Although their work is currently in an early stage, later versions of the nanowire technology could find applications in biosensing, neuroscience, and medicine.

There are two things that are very exciting about this early-stage research. One, it means that cellular membranes could be incorporated into computerized devices that are designed to respond to molecules in the environment. Essentially, you could have a cellular sensor at the end of a nanowire.

But the applications for neuroscience and medicine are even greater. The membrane that these researchers have learned to manipulate is part of the same system that controls cell-to-cell communication in the human body. Proteins that arrange themselves on the surface of cells serve as signal transducer, conveying information between genetic material inside each cell to proteins or chemicals in the blood (and vice versa). For example, when a cell malfunctions, it usually sends out a signal asking to be destroyed by the cells around it. In cancer and AIDS, however, this signal is interrupted so that the diseased cells continue to thrive and infect more of the body. Being able to control those cellular signals with nanowires could potentially help contain some cancers.

It would also open up a very weird area of medicine whose consequences we can't know for certain. What would it mean if you could control cellular signals, sending very precise messages to cells or cell groups? Obviously it would be great for controlling healing, but could it also be a method of physical enhancement? A way to lose weight by telling fat cells to die? It's possible.

via PNAS

Reuters' FaithWorld blog has been covering the University of Pennsylvania's Neuroscience Boot Camp, going on now, and one message has become clear:

You can forget about the "God spot" that headline writers love to highlight (as in "‘God spot' is found in Brain" or "Scientists Locate ‘God Spot' in Human Brain"). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.

"There isn't a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data," said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. "It's not like there's a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is."

The image above shows two different brain scans, one from someone who is singing, and the other one from someone who is speaking in tongues. They look almost entirely identical, but you can just about glimpse a slight difference in blood flow to the frontal lobe, and specifically to the left caudate, among the "speaking in tongues" brains. (Thanks to The NeuroCritic for the image, and for pointing out that the study's authors admit their "results were hypothesis driven.")

The FaithBlog quotes neurological researcher Geoff Aguirre as pouring cold water on the idea that an fMRI scanner is like a mind reader, and calls the idea that you could use an fMRI to catch terrorists "science fiction, science fantasy." Adds Aguirre:

There's definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.

I also love his comments about "Cartesian dualism," in which people try to claim that someone's actions weren't his fault because "his brain did that." (As if he and his brain are two separate beings.)

[Reuters and The NeuroCritic]

Neuroscientists have discovered that the amygdala - the part of the brain that senses fear and emotion - kicks into gear when people listen to scary music with their eyes shut. To prove this theory, volunteers in a study held at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel were monitored while listening to pieces of music both with and without the benefit of visual stimulus. While more neutral music produced the same responses from those with eyes opened and closed, more unsettling music produced more neurotransmitter noradrenalin in subjects with closed eyes than open, as if responding to a threat. Talma Hendler, who ran the study, isn't surprised by the results:

A lot of time we do like to close our eyes when we listen to music, we feel like this is a more powerful experience... I suspect if we had music that was positive, we would get a similar effect.

Now all we need to do is fund a similar study on what happens to those who listen to Stan Bush's "The Touch."

Scary music is spookier with eyes shut [New Scientist]

About the study, New Scientist writes:

The researchers do, however, have suspicions about what the active chemical might be. The steroid androstadienone is the primary suspect, and [lead researcher Lilianne] Mujica-Parodi's team say it plans to synthesise it.

"I'm not naïve about the fact that some people will look at this study and say it was irresponsible," says Mujica-Parodi. There are obvious ethical issues about synthesising a chemical that could induce fear in other people, and the group's early research was funded by the US military.

I'm glad Mujica-Parodi isn't naive about what other people will think. But isn't she being a little naive about what other people will do with this stuff if she successfully recreates it?

via New Scientist

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]

So what has hip-hop done to incur the wrath of pediatric neurosurgeons? It gave the world car surfing, which involves one or more persons treating the head of a moving car as a surfboard. The paper points the finger at the Bay Area's Hyphy movement, in particular, for glamorizing an activity that tends to end in severe head trauma.

The study's authors don't lay exclusive blame on Hyphy, noting that the car-surfing meme (along with head injuries) spikes with each release of Grand Theft Auto, each YouTube video, and every incident of car surfing on the silver screen (Teen Wolf gets a mention, but Zoe Bell's nail-biting Death Proof stunt is conspicuously absent). But, unless they can travel back in time and kill the Hyphy movement's grandparents, it seems that these neurologists are stuck with the ages-old problem of keeping kids from doing stupid things.

Neurological injuries from car surfing [Journal of Neurosurgery]

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]

Philosopher Dan Lloyd uses functional MRIs — which track changes in brain activity by lighting up in different colors and intensities as the brain processes information — to create music, by assigning each area of the brain a note and each level of intensity a volume. A computer does the rest, analyzing the movements of the functional MRIs and creating musical pieces that correspond to the changes.

In the course of his work, Lloyd discovered that scans of patients with dementia and schizophrenia make audibly different music than those of people with normal brains: people with dementia have more erratic rhythms and less bright notes, while people with schizophrenia have more complex patterns in the music created by their brains.

Besides making their way onto the iPods of Lloyd's students, scientists think the application could allow them to better distinguish abnormalities in brain scans. According to New Scientist:

His colleague Didier Grandjean at the University of Geneva in Switzerland says that brain music might help identify temporal patterns in particular. "Melodies are a much better way to build complex mental representations over time than anything the eye can do," he says.

Of course, that's only if one takes the time to pay attention to the music that's being made, as opposed to how we think it ought to sound.

Eavesdropping On The Music Of The Brain [New Scientist]

Related: D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune) [YouTube]

[Image via the Centre for Educational Neuroscience]

A group of Spanish researchers reported today in Science that they may have stumbled upon a substance that could become the ultimate memory-enhancer. The group was studying a poorly-understood region of the visual cortex. They found that if they boosted production of a protein called RGS-14 (pictured) in that area of the visual cortex in mice, it dramatically affected the animals' ability to remember objects they had seen.

Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.

The researchers concluded that this region of the visual cortex, known as layer six of region V2, is responsible for creating visual memories. When the region is removed, mice can no longer remember any object they see.

If this protein boosts visual memory in humans, the implications are staggering. In their paper, the researchers say that it could be used as a memory-enhancer – which seems like an understatement. What's particularly intriguing is the fact that this protein works on visual memory only. So as I mentioned earlier, it would be perfect for mapping. It would also be useful for engineers and architects who need to hold a lot of visual images in their minds at once. And it would also be a great drug for detectives and spies.

Could it also be a way to gain photographic memory? For example, if I look at a page of text will I remember the words perfectly? Or will I simply remember how the page looked?

I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug, unless the act of not forgetting what you see causes problems or trauma.

via Science

Writing in the journal BMC Neuroscience, Kristen Muller-Vahl and her team explained how they used a new technique, Magnetic Transfer Imaging (MTI) to scan the prefrontal areas of the brains of 19 Tourette's sufferers as well as 20 control subjects. They found alterations in the "frontostriatial circuitries" of the Tourette's brains, that may explain the causes of the disorder. In particular, Tourette's sufferers showed "significant decreases in grey matter volumes" in some key prefrontal areas, and decreased white matter in others.

So changes in the architecture of the frontal lobe lead to "disinhibition of the cingulate gyrus and abnormal basal ganglia function." How long before we can craft a drug to restore normal structure to people's prefrontal lobes? Or even cause a temporary abnormality in people, to reduce their self-control? Just imagine dosing people at a party, or using it as a weapon to cause confusion among our enemies. [via EurekAlert]

The researchers first proved this using rats. According to ABC News:

[Neuroscientist Marie Monfils'] team first taught rats to associate a musical tone with a slight electric shock. Playing the tone with no shock generally causes rats to freeze in fear. When her team played the tone over and over again, 19 times, the rats displayed less and less fear. This is standard extinction therapy. However, a month later their fear of the tone returned, strong as ever.

To make the effect permanent, Monfils team jogged other rats' memories of shocks just once, waited an hour for memory reconsolidation to begin, and then played the tone over and over.

"It's very simple and almost naïve to think it would work," Monfils says. But the fearful memories disappeared permanently.

Later, another research group tried the same test on humans, teaching subjects to associate the sight of a blue square with a shock. Using this therapy, they halted the humans' fear responses (measured in sweating) to the blue square. They were also able to retrain the people to fear a yellow square, but not the blue one. This sounds like something straight out of a dystopian 1970s movie, where giant computers would train humans to fear glowing blue squares and glowing yellow squares in order to force them to polish strangely bulbous plastic furniture.

via ABC

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

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.

Over at VeryEvolved, a lengthy and fascinating article on the nature of nostalgia explains how our brains process memories. And how the disruption of fond, nostalgic feelings can result in extreme emotional backlash:

Every time you recall a memory it may become subtly altered and associated with what ever it was that triggered that old memory. If this trigger happens repeatedly, then you're adding new layer of interpretation that will be recalled automatically with the old memory next time it's called up.

A great example of this in action that also demonstrates fluid nostalgia, is the backlash against George Lucas. A large portion of 70's and 80's children had grown up owning Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader figures and playing in the backyard pretending sticks were light sabers. Fond childhood memories.
When the first abysmal Star Wars Prequel was released the strong feelings against the film weren't just those of disappointment at a bad movie. If it were that simple, we should also feel the same way about Police Academy 7.

The reaction can be partly explained by the sense of attack on our previously fond feelings. Watching the new movie automatically calls up memories from the previous series and all the pleasant childhood playtime memories associated with it. But recalling these fond memories in the context of a negative experience begins the process of re-coding, or modifying our old memories. This is an undesirable outcome for nostalgia as it is usually such a pleasant feeling. Naturally there is some resistance and cognitive dissonance when this happens and the brain will try to avoid it like any other unpleasant experience.

This article is fun and informative - definitely worth checking out. It also includes a quick explanation of why people who hated Duran Duran in the 1980s get warm feelings of nostalgia on hearing the pop band today.

via Very Evolved

Photo by Bonnie Burton.

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

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]

Scientists have discovered that disabling series of genes in mice makes them engage in repetitive actions, similar to what humans do when they have schizophrenia, autism, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. But, as the researchers report in a paper to be published in Neuron tomorrow, medicines could be used to replicate the functions of the disabled genes, essentially switching off the craziness like a light. Is this a weapon or a cure?

Obviously the researchers are most interested in how their discovery could help bring stability into the lives of people suffering neurological distress. They hope to garget FKBP12, a key gene involved in creating the obsessive behaviors, for therapeutic techniques. NYU's Eric Klann, a researcher on the project, said:

[FKBP12] may be an ideal target for therapeutic drug development aimed at ameliorating some of the . . . related pathologies of neurological disease.

However, this research could just as easily lead to drugs that temporarily induce schizophrenic states. Exploring the cascade of effects created when tampering with FKBP12 has revealed that the gene is involved with enhanced memory as well. Would it be worth it to become temporarily OCD or autistic if it would give you an incredibly sharp memory for a few hours or days?

In twenty years, you could see rooms full of students taking tests who are hopped up on FKBP12 inhibitors, carefully regurgitating all the answers they memorized but unfortunately also feeling compelled to wash their hands every five minutes. And of course inducing schizophrenia in prisoners could become a new form of torture.

Brain deletion of FK-506 Binding Protein Enhances Repetitive Behaviors in Mice [via Neuron]

Image from Scorpions' awesome album Blackout. If you already knew that, you are an old fart like me.

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.

The research team at the Karolinksa Institute presented their findings today at the annual meeting at the Society for Neuroscience. They provided male and female volunteers with sensory input to convince them that they had switched bodies with another person or a mannequin:

Volunteers experienced the body-swap illusion by receiving simultaneous visual and motor input from another’s body. In one experiment, each participant stood across from a male mannequin, and in another experiment volunteers faced a female experimenter. A headset covering participants’ eyes displayed a three-dimensional view of the other’s visual perspective, transmitted from a small video camera positioned on the mannequin’s or the woman’s head.

In the mannequin situation, an experimenter simultaneously touched the participant’s belly and the mannequin’s belly with separate probes. So the volunteer felt a poking in the abdomen but saw the poking happen as if he or she were the mannequin. In the real-person situation, participant and experimenter shook hands. Thus, while volunteers felt the sensation of hand shaking, it appeared to them that they were shaking their own hand. After 10 to 12 seconds of abdominal touch or hand-shaking, male and female participants spontaneously had the experience of looking out from the body of the male mannequin or the female experimenter. They literally felt that they were in the mannequin’s body getting poked or had embodied the female experimenter and were shaking their own hands.

Neither male nor female participants had any trouble convincing themselves that they had entered the body of the male mannequin. Similarly, when male volunteers were given sensory input from the female experimenter, they readily believed that they had swapped bodies with her. And as surreal as the experience was, presenter Valeria Petkova reported that the subjects were ready for another go:

“Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again.”

[Science News]

According to representatives at the NWO research institute where the study was done:

The researchers showed that the brain responds to such faulty utterances with a specific electrophysiological signal. It was already known that this wave occurs when making behavioural errors, such as pressing a wrong button by accident. This wave, called Error-Related Negativity, is informally known as the 'Oh-shit' wave. The brain registers at once that something is amiss.

The most important conclusion of the study is that the way in which the brain uses language is not fundamentally different from how other actions such as grabbing or walking are carried out. The 'Oh-shit' wave registers errors so rapidly that they can sometimes be corrected in time. In this way you can stop yourself from falling down the stairs or saying the wrong thing.

So when you yell "Oh shit!" after you stub your toe, that's your brain trying to stop you from getting hurt — and getting there a little too late.

Brain Recognizes Verbal "Oh Shit" Wave [via NWO]

Image via About.com.

Ultrasound has a lot of great uses, like creating an image of an unborn baby or testing the internal structure of a piece of metal without destroying the piece. What we mean by "ultrasound" is a pressure wave with a frequency above about 20 kHz, the upper limit of hearing for most humans. By measuring the different rates of reflection off of different surfaces, we can use it as a sort of "sonic x-ray" on some materials, including pregnant women's tummies. Scientists have known for decades that ultrasound causes changes in muscle and nerve tissues, but the ASU team studied exactly what happens at the cellular level. They found that LILF ultrasound starts a series of reactions that eventually trigger synapses within the brain.

The short-term relevance of the research could revolutionize certain medical procedures that require neuron stimulation. A host of therapies for various mental conditions currently require implantation of electrodes into the brain, and thus are seldom performed due to the risk. Ultrasound might be able to do the job non-invasively and open the door to these treatments for tens of thousands of patients.

For now, the researchers are focused on giving Arnold Schwarzenegger a fake vacation to Mars. Lead investigator William Tyler weighed on the potential for ultrasonic brain control:

"One might be able to envision potential applications ranging from medical interventions to use in video gaming or the creation of artificial memories along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in 'Total Recall.' Imagine taking a vacation without actually going anywhere? Obviously, we need to conduct further research and development, but one of the most exhilarating prospects is that low intensity, low frequency ultrasound permit deep-brain stimulation procedures without requiring exogenous proteins or surgically implanted medical devices."

Image by: Reigh LeBlanc.

Ultrasound shown to exert remote control of brain circuits. [EurekAlert!]

According to the Daily Grail, the scientists from Goldsmith College’s Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit got mixed results with their EMF-laced house:

Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with ‘‘haunted’’ locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations include fluctuations in the electromagnetic field (EMF) and the presence of infrasound. A review of such work is presented, followed by the results of the "Haunt" project in which an attempt was made to construct an artificial "haunted" room by systematically varying such environmental factors.

Unfortunately, when the team tested this theory, they came up ghostless. They asked 79 participants to walk through their haunted house and record if and where they experienced any unusual sensations. While some participants did feel such sensations, the locations in the house where they felt the sensations did not correlate with the locations the team had “haunted,” suggesting the sensations were caused more by the power of suggestion than electromagnetic fields.

But other researchers have had more luck summoning ghosts with EMF. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University, published a study on a brain damaged girl who reported frequent nocturnal visits from an apparition. Reports Scientific American:

When Persinger and his colleagues investigated (at the behest of the girl's mother), they found an electric clock next to the bed that was about 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) from where she placed her head when she slept. Tests showed that the clock generated electromagnetic pulses with waveforms similar to those found to trigger epileptic seizures in rats and humans. When the clock was removed, the visions stopped. Persinger determined that the clock, in combination with the girl's brain injury, were highly likely to have been contributing factors to the perceived nocturnal visits.

Regardless of the cause, the notions of ghosts and haunting do have a measured effect on our psyches. In 2005, a study published in Human Nature had participants take a test on which they were given the opportunity to cheat. Some of the test takers were told the room was haunted, while the others were not. The students in the haunted group were overwhelmingly less likely to cheat than the non-haunted group, suggesting that, even if they didn’t fear ghostly retribution, they still had the uneasy feeling that someone might be watching them.

The 'Haunt' Project [Daily Grail]
Ghost Lusters: If You Want to See a Specter Badly Enough, Will You? [Scientific American]
Spooky Science: Does a Fear of Ghosts Help Keep Us Honest? [Scientific American]

British neuroscientists did fMRI brain scans of subjects while they looked at pictures of people they claimed to hate. As a baseline, they also showed them pictures of people they felt neutrally about. Not surprisingly, hatred activated the regions of the brain associated with aggression and the motor regions that would translate this aggression into action. And given that love often turns into hate, it's not too surprising that hatred also activates two brain regions, the putamen and the insula, associated with passionate, romantic love.

What is surprising is the degree to which hatred is associated with logic and planning. The researchers write in their paper:

What seems not to be in doubt is that this cortical zone involves the premotor cortex, a zone that has been implicated in the preparation of motor planning and its execution. We hypothesize that the sight of a hated person mobilizes the motor system for the possibility of attack or defense. In addition, the involvement of the frontal pole consider to be critical in predicting the action of others, arguably an important feature when confronted by a hated person . . . it is more likely that in
the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgment in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise extract revenge.

So basically, hating somebody heightens your judgment and your ability to assess what other people are likely to do next. The researchers note that in this way hatred is neurologically unlike love, which tends to deactivate judgment.

Semir Zeki, one of the authors, suggested that they are on the path to developing tools that might allow researchers to figure out how much somebody hates another person just by doing a brain scan. Somehow, he imagines this might be used in court:

Interestingly, the activity in some of these structures in response to viewing a hated face is proportional in strength to the declared intensity of hate, thus allowing the subjective state of hate to be objectively quantified. This finding may have legal implications in criminal cases, for example.

Given that hate crimes lead to tougher sentences many states, Zeki might well be right. If a court can prove that somebody committed an act of violence while under the influence of hate, that person might go to jail for a much longer time than they would otherwise.

Neural Correlates of Hate [via PLoS One]

The researchers tested mice by shocking them while the mice heard a specific tone. They evaluated whether the mice remembered the shock by watching to see whether the mouse froze in fear upon hearing the tone again, or upon revisiting the chamber where it had been shocked. After being dosed with CaMKII while they recalled the fearful memories, the mice ceased to fear the tones and chamber. In a paper to be published tomorrow in scientific journal Neuron, Tsien proves that these memories weren't just temporarily blocked by the enzyme, but erased. No memories other than the targeted ones appeared to have been impaired.

Said Tsien:

Given the fact that so many war veterans often suffer from reoccurring traumatic memory replays after returning home, our report of selective erasure of fear memories in an inducible and rapid way suggests the existence of molecular paradigm(s) under which traumatic memories can be erased or degraded while preserving other memories in the brain.

Of course there might be nefarious applications of this memory-erasing procedure as well. Soldiers who fear war could be made to un-fear it, and people could be induced to forget political or family ties. In fact, once memory is malleable in such a granular way, people could literally give themselves personality reboots. Imagine what you would be like if you didn't have to remember that horrible childhood, or abusive boyfriend, or that you wanted to vote for the pro-science candidate in the election.

Inducible and Selective Erasure of Memories in the Mouse Brain via Chemical-Genetic Manipulation [via Neuron]

What's particularly interesting about this research is that it shows the versatility of the motor cortex when combined with a brain-computer interface (BCI). Previous research showed that people could learn to move a cursor on screen by linking to specific areas of the motor cortex. This new study showed that any area of the motor cortex could be "repurposed" to activate muscles in the body via BCI.

Say the researchers:

Until now, brain-computer interfaces were designed to decode the activity of neurons known to be associated with movement of specific body parts. Here, the researchers discovered that any motor cortex cell, regardless of whether it had been previously associated with wrist movement, was capable of stimulating muscle activity. This finding greatly expands the potential number of neurons that could control signals for brain-computer interfaces and also illustrates the flexibility of the motor cortex.

Human implementations for the technology are at least a decade away, but this discovery could be a game-changer for dealing with paralysis. One possibility would be to connect the motor cortex with an area of the spine below an injury. Signals would be re-routed around the damaged spinal cord, and could allow the brain to regain control of the paralyzed body parts affected by the injury.

Image via Cortech Solutions.

Direct Control of Paralyzed Muscles by Cortical Neurons [via Nature]

Prosecution offices in India have set up labs to examine suspects who submit to the test. When areas of the brain associated with memory, such as those dealing with smell and sound, light up during the description of a crime, prosecutors see that as evidence of the subject's commission of the crime:

Ms. Sharma, 24, agreed to take a BEOS test in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra. (Suspects may be tested only with their consent, but forensic investigators say many agree because they assume it will spare them an aggressive police interrogation.)

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma's head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald's”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to Mr. Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph's assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

Previously, Indian courts had accepted BEOS results only as corroborating evidence, not proof in itself of criminal activity. Citing the seriousness of the outcome (Sharma received a life sentence), many neuroscientists and bioethicists in the US have stated that the technology, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, has entered the legal system far too soon. But even if these supposed mind-reading technologies never meet the evidentiary standards of courts outside of India, other possible public and private uses exist:

No Lie MRI, a company in California, promises on its Web site to use the scans to help with developing interpersonal trust and military intelligence, among other tasks. In August, a committee of the National Research Council in Washington predicted that, with greater research, brain scans could eventually aid “the acquisition of intelligence from captured unlawful combatants” and “the screening of terrorism suspects at checkpoints.”

Image from Bioedge.

India's Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated [NY Times]

So basically you don't need that speed to stay awake. You just need to, well, stay awake. The researchers speculate that amphetamines emulate the body's natural response to sleeplessness, which is to boost your alertness with extra dopamine. Speed tricks your body into thinking it needs a boost after a sleepless night.

But there's a good reason why people don't get addicted to staying up all night. According to Science Daily:

The rise in dopamine following sleep deprivation may promote wakefulness to compensate for sleep loss. "However, the concurrent decline in cognitive performance, which is associated with the dopamine increases, suggests that the adaptation is not sufficient to overcome the cognitive deterioration induced by sleep deprivation and may even contribute to it," said study author [Dr. Nora] Volkow.

So I guess the message is that if you want to stay up all night, and keep that cognitive performance going, you'll have to turn to drugs. Or maybe you could just get some sleep.

One Sleepless Night Increases Dopamine in the Human Brain [Science Daily]

Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman quotes from the University of California at Irvine researchers:

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would "think" a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

As Shachtman points out, this is just one of several projects the military is funding in the area of what amounts to psychic ops. Last week, intelligence officials released a lengthy report on using neuroscience on the battlefield — including mind control! I'm just excited that this synthetic ESP stuff is being researched in my old hometown of Irvine, which also happens to be in Orange County, where Philip K. Dick's schizo-mind-control novel A Scanner Darkly takes place.

You heard it here first: The psychic apocalypse will start in Orange County, CA.

Army Funds "Synthetic Telepathy" Research [Danger Room]