Film-maker Noah Hutton has just released an excellent 15-minute documentary on the Blue Brain project that captures the team as they work and explains the goals of the ambitious attempt to simulate animal, and eventually, human scale neural networks on computer.
It's an interesting look both inside the scientific mission and inside the mind of project leader Henry Markram, whom it must be said, is largely talking about the potential of the project rather than what it can do now.
It's probably worth saying that Markram is not known for underselling his efforts, and some of his projections seem a little unrealistic.
At one point he mentions that the project could be used in hospital so doctors can simulate the effects of drugs on a digital brain to see if they'll work before giving patien...
Blue Brain Year One
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On communicating through the coma-like state
A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on how a subset of patients diagnosed as being in a coma-like state can be trained to show specific brain activity to answer yes / no questions despite seeming to be unconscious and unresponsive.
Many news reports seem to suggest that researchers have found a way of 'reaching inside coma' with a brain scanner to communicate with patients but the findings are much more modest, only 5 out of 54 patients could reliably produce specific brain activity on command and only one was tested who could answer simple yes / no questions in this way.
Despite this, the study is still incredibly impressive and it indicates that some patients who seem unconscious may have a much richer inner life than we assume and it may be possible t...
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Eureka brain special and more fighting
The Times has just released its monthly science magazine, Eureka, with a special issue on the brain and all the articles freely available online.
There doesn't seem to be a way to link to a whole issue, but inside you'll find an excellent piece on the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily switch off bits of the working brain, a profile of neurosurgeon Huma Sethi, an article on commercial brain-computer interfaces, a remarkable piece on how old injuries can 'return' to affect phantom limbs as well as an exploration of the link between brain activity and sporting skill.
Probably my favourite is an article on how forensic science and criminology are increasingly using neuroscience, and there's also an account of a writer's experience of being brain scanned and a desc...
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What is Alcoholism?
Alcoholism is a primary, chronic, progressive disorder that has a predictable course; with inherited, physical, psychological and environmental risk factors; and is fatal if not treated and its progress arrested.
A Disease of the Brain
Alcoholism is also a brain disease because alcohol changes the brainâit changes its structure, how it works and how it thinks. These brain changes can be long lasting, and lead to the harmful behaviors seen in people who are alcoholic.
Primary
Alcoholism is not the result of another disorder but it is a causative factor in other disorders.
Chronic
Alcoholism is a chronic condition that continues over a long time, progresses consistently or intermittently, and can be managed.
Progressive and Predictable
As an addictive drug, alcohol use over time can lead t...
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Brain Recovers from Alcohol Damage
Recovering brain
Brain Has Remarkable Power to Recover from Alcohol Ravages
Excessive alcohol use can literally shrink the brain, impairing memory, learning, and organizational skills. But the brain also can recover most if not all of its capabilities when drinking stops, researchers say.
The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 22, that studies and thinking tests were used to track the brain changes in a group of alcoholics as they embarked on the road to sobriety. They found that after just two months of abstinence, the alcoholics’ brain volume increased an average of 1.85 percent, while the communication efficiency of their brain cells rose 20 percent. These chemical changes were matched by improvements in tests of thinking function.
Researchers found that the changes only took place a...
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Human brain electrodes capture the twilight zone
Sleep is a nightmare for neuroscientists but a new study using electrodes implanted deep within the brains of people going about their daily lives has revealed that the brain falls asleep from the inside out, contrary to what was expected.
Most neuropsychology studies require people to complete tasks while the brain is being monitored and the technologies that allow passive recording either only measure activity on the brain surface (EEG, MEG) or are too uncomfortable to measure realistic sleep (fMRI, PET). This is one of the reasons human sleep has been difficult to study and why we still understand little about it.
A new study just published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used the innovative technique of recording from semi-permanent electrodes implanted ...
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All aboard the baby brain
The March edition of The Psychologist has just appeared online and has two freely available articles: one article investigates whether women really suffer a reduction in mental sharpness during pregnancy, and another interviews baby psychologist Alison Gopnik about her work.
This idea that pregnancy causes a slight reduction in mental sharpness, sometimes known as 'baby brain' or 'pregnesia', is widespread but the results from scientific studies are mixed, and at best show only a negligible effect:
Weâve seen that whilst many women report experiencing cognitive difficulties during pregnancy, objective evidence for a link between pregnancy and cognitive decline has been inconsistent. This begs the question: does the memory deficit, if it exists, matter? Is there sufficient cause for w...
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In Our Time on the Infant Brain
This morning's edition of BBC Radio 4's brilliant In Our Time was dedicated to the infant brain and has a wide ranging discussion about how ideas about the early development of the child developed into the modern age of neuroscience.
The streamed version will be available on the website permanently, but if you want to download the podcast you only have a week to do so from this page.
Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.
For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.
Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills on...
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A man with virtually no serotonin or dopamine
Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case of a man born with a genetic mutation meaning he had a severe lifelong deficiency of both serotonin and dopamine.
The case report concerns a gentleman with sepiapterin reductase deficiency, a genetic condition which prevents the production of the enzyme sepiapterin reductase which is essential in the synthesis of both dopamine and serotonin.
The most widely recognised symptoms of the condition, linked to the deficiency in dopamine which has an important role in controlling movement, are problems coordinating both conscious movements and the unconscious control of muscles that allows simple actions. Unconscious control requires that the brain signals one muscle to contract while releasing the complementary muscle, and problems with this process cause...
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Tracking the unborn brain into childhood
A brain scanning technology called MEG is being used to track the function of unborn babies' brains as they grow inside the womb until after they've been born.
The full name for MEG is magnetoencephalography and it works by reading the magnetic fields created by the electrical signalling in the brain.
One of the advantages is that it can be used at various angles, doesn't require the person to be in a cramped space, and is less sensitive to movement, so is ideally suited to scanning babies.
This includes unborn babies and with a bit of modification, as illustrated in the picture, researchers can pick up signals from the fetal brain in response to flashes or light or sounds.
We discussed the use of fMRI to scan the fetal brain previously, but this is a remarkable study that scanned the ...
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Roald Dahl's Marvelleous Medicine
Author Roald Dahl was particularly well known for darkly humorous children's books that form a riotous part of almost every childhood in Britain. Less well known is that he also made some significant contributions to neurology, as detailed in a brief article for Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.
The article is available online as a pdf and starts by noting that several of his books contain possible nods to neurological syndromes or fantastical fictional experiments.
These descriptions may hardly be termed âcontributionsâ, but two personal tragedies certainly did lead to developments of clinical import. Whilst living in New York in 1960, Dahlâs son Theo, aged 3-4 months, was involved in a road traffic accident which caused some brain damage and secondary hydroc...
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Roald Dahl's Marveleous Medicine
Author Roald Dahl was particularly well known for darkly humorous children's books that form a riotous part of almost every childhood in Britain. Less well known is that he also made some significant contributions to neurology, as detailed in a brief article for Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.
The article is available online as a pdf and starts by noting that several of his books contain possible nods to neurological syndromes or fantastical fictional experiments.
These descriptions may hardly be termed âcontributionsâ, but two personal tragedies certainly did lead to developments of clinical import. Whilst living in New York in 1960, Dahlâs son Theo, aged 3-4 months, was involved in a road traffic accident which caused some brain damage and secondary hydroc...
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Roald Dahl's Marvelous Medicine
Author Roald Dahl was particularly well known for darkly humorous children's books that form a riotous part of almost every childhood in Britain. Less well known is that he also made some significant contributions to neurology, as detailed in a brief article for Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.
The article is available online as a pdf and starts by noting that several of his books contain possible nods to neurological syndromes or fantastical fictional experiments.
These descriptions may hardly be termed âcontributionsâ, but two personal tragedies certainly did lead to developments of clinical import. Whilst living in New York in 1960, Dahlâs son Theo, aged 3-4 months, was involved in a road traffic accident which caused some brain damage and secondary hydroc...
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Rodent brain in sex claim shocker
Those tenacious chaps over at Language Log have followed up Louann Brizendine's claims that men have a 'defend your turf area' by chasing up the references in her ominous new book The Male Brain which is showing all the signs of being as scientifically shaky as the last one.
Like a couple of people who commented on our post, they picked up on my previous and erroneous remark that the dorsal premammilliary nuclei had not been identified in humans - it has, but its function, as far as I know, has never been studied in humans (the previous post has now been updated).
Language Log also note that many of the Brizendine's claims seem to be drawn from directly from rat studies and just assumed to apply to humans even when they specifically refer to, er, cat odor.
In other words, the DPN is i...
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Alzheimer's Disease with Dr. Peter Whitehouse (BSP 68)
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Send feedback to gincampbell at mac dot com or leave voice mail at 206-984-0358. (Source: the Brain Science Podcast and Blog with Dr. Ginger Campbell)
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Hacking toy EEGs
Frontier Nerds has an excellent guide to toy EEGs (the commercially available 'mind control' games) and detailed instructions on how to hack the MindFlex to use it as a brain-computer interface.
In the last year or so, numerous 'mind control' games have appeared that are essentially cheap consumer EEG devices with a dull as ditch-water games attached. For example, the 'Force Trainer' reads off EEG signals and levitates a ball. Yes, that's it.
There are developer's kits available for some of the products but they tend to be quite expensive. Frontier Nerds realised you can buy a cheaper model and with a little messing around can pull the data right off the electronics.
Even if you've no intention of hacking any of these devices, the piece is an interesting look inside the construction of ...
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Charlie Rose Brain Series online and complete
The Charlie Rose discussion show has an ongoing series on the brain and all of the episodes are available online where some of world's leading neuroscientists extensively tackle the big questions of the field.
I'm just watching the programmes at the moment and while they can seem a little stiff at times, it lovely to see neuroscience being discussed without being dumbed down but while key concepts are explained and explored.
The discussions are co-hosted by Charlie Rose and Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and the seven shows so far have tackled The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain, The Perceiving Brain, The Acting Brain, The Social Brain, The Developing Brain, The Ageing Brain and The Emotional Brain.
Future shows include The Anxious Brain, The Mentally Ill Brain, The D...
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Can I get an amen?
This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how assumptions about speakers' abilities changed the evoked BOLD response [changes in blood oxygenation indicating neural activity] in secular and Christian participants who received intercessory prayer. We find that recipients' assumptions about senders' charismatic abilities have important effects on their executive network. Most notably, the Christian participants deactivated the frontal network consisting of the medial and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally in response to speakers who they believed had healing abilities. An independent analysis across subjects revealed that this deactivation predicted the Christian participants' subsequent ratings of the speakers' charisma and experience of God's presence...
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Know the signs of brain hemorrhage!
         A brain hemorrhage is a type of stroke.  It’s caused by an artery in the brain bursting and causing localized bleeding in the surrounding tissues. This bleeding kills brain cells. The Greek root for blood is hemo. Hemorrhage literally means âblood bursting forthâ.  Brain hemorrhages are also called cerebral hemorrhages, intracranial hemorrhages or intracerebral hemorrhages.  They account for about 13% of strokes. Hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel bursts inside the brain.  The brain is very sensitive to bleeding and damage can occur very rapidly.  Bleeding irritates the brain tissue, causing swelling.  Bleeding collects into a mass called a hematoma. Bleeding also increases pressure on the brain and presses it against the skull. Hemor...
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K-Space Division
This is an amazing summary of a study just published in the latest edition of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. I have no idea what it's about but it helps if you read it in the voice of Dr Spock.
Susceptibility mapping in the human brain using threshold-based k-space division.
Magn Reson Med. 2010 May;63(5):1292-304.
Wharton S, Schäfer A, Bowtell R.
[Captain] A method for calculating quantitative three-dimensional susceptibility maps from field measurements acquired using gradient echo imaging at high field is presented. This method is based on division of the three-dimensional Fourier transforms of high-pass-filtered field maps by a simple function that is the Fourier transform of the convolution kernel linking field and susceptibility, and uses k-space masking to avoid noise enhanc...
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