Brain
To The Brain, Reading Computer Code Is Not The Same As Reading Language
In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to do. The computer code must also be clear enough that other programmers can read and understand it. In spite of those similarities, …
Are There ‘Male’ And ‘Female’ Brains? Computers Can See A Distinction
How useful are the well-known and hotly contested categories of “male brain” and “female brain”? Among experts, nobody really questions that anatomical sex differences in the brain exist. But since the advent of brain science, the scientific community has been divided over how many differences there are, which ones have been definitively proven, how large …
Designing Artificial Brains Can Help Us Learn More About Real Ones
Despite billions of dollars spent and decades of research, computation in the human brain remains largely a mystery. Meanwhile, we have made great strides in the development of artificial neural networks, which are designed to loosely mimic how brains compute. We have learned a lot about the nature of neural computation from these artificial brains …
Helping Advance Huntington’s Disease Research By Using AI To Map the Human Brain
Neurodegenerative diseases are disorders that progressively affect neurons in the brain, altering their function and causing their death. They include many different disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, which are among the top causes of disability and death and cost hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the U.S. alone (1). Huntington’s disease …
Using Machine Learning Tools To Reveal How Memories Are Coded In The Brain
Researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at the National University Of Singapore (NUS), led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from NUS Psychology, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme at NUS Engineering, have discovered that a population of neurons in the brain’s frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural …
How Memories Are Formed And Retrieved By The Brain Revealed In A New Study
Try to remember that last dinner you went out for. Perhaps you can remember the taste of that delicious pasta, the sounds of the jazz pianist in the corner, or that boisterous laugh from the portly gentleman three tables over. What you probably can’t remember is putting any effort into remembering any of these little …
MIT Researchers Develops A Slimy Worm Robot For Less Invasive Surgeries
MIT engineers have developed a magnetically steerable, thread-like robot that can actively glide through narrow, winding pathways, such as the labrynthine vasculature of the brain. In the future, this robotic thread may be paired with existing endovascular technologies, enabling doctors to remotely guide the robot through a patient’s brain vessels to quickly treat blockages and …
See How Our Brains Group Words By Meaning In Surprisingly Complex Semantic Maps
A groundbreaking new study from the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley is transforming how scientists understand language organisation in the brain. Published in Nature on 28 April 2016, the paper ‘Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps That Tile Human Cerebral Cortex’ reveals that we use our entire brain – and not just the temporal lobe, as once believed – to group …
Remote Control Of The Brain Is Coming: How Will We Use It?
Controlling the minds of others from a distance has long been a favourite science fiction theme – but recent advances in genetics and neuroscience suggest that we might soon have that power for real. Just over a decade ago, the bioengineer Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University published their paper on the optical control …
An Electronic Chip That Makes ‘Memories’ Is A Step Towards Creating Bionic Brains
What better way to build smarter computer chips than to mimic nature’s most perfect computer – the human brain? Being able to store, delete and process information is crucial for computing, and the brain does this extremely efficiently. Our new electronic chip uses light to create and modify memories, moving us closer towards artificial intelligence …