Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 952
Feb 22, 2016
Facebook Impacts Brain Similar To Cocaine, Gambling
Posted by Karen Hurst in category: neuroscience
I knew it! Now, we have proof; FB is addicting like cocaine.
Facebook impacts the brain in a similar way to cocaine, gambling and other substance and compulsive addictions, says a new study.
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Feb 22, 2016
Swiss Startups Delving Into Virtual Reality
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: neuroscience, virtual reality
On the heels of the MindMaze round of $100 million, it is clear that Swiss tech is booming and beginning to tickle the curiosity of international investors.
The startup had already closed an angel funding round of $10 million and recently announced the opening of their Series A round at a $1 billion valuation. The lead investor is multinational conglomerate Hinduja Group, with participation from family offices that haven’t been disclosed yet.
MindMaze is a neuro-rehabilitation platform that helps stroke victims to recover faster by “fooling” the brain through VR/AR technology.
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Feb 22, 2016
Eating chocolate regularly can ‘improve brain function’ according to a new study
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: food, neuroscience
Good news for chocolate lovers: eating the sweet treat has been found to have a positive association with cognitive performance, according to a new study.
Published in the journal Appetite, researchers used data collected from a Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS), in which 968 people aged between 23 and 98 were measured for dietary intake and cardiovascular risk factors, as well as cognitive function.
The researchers found that regularly eating chocolate was significantly associated with cognitive function “irrespective of other dietary habits”.
Feb 22, 2016
IARPA Project Targets Hidden Algorithms of the Brain
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: computing, information science, neuroscience, robotics/AI
Whether in the brain or in code, neural networks are shaping up to be one of the most critical areas of research in both neuroscience and computer science. An increasing amount of attention, funding, and development has been pushed toward technologies that mimic the brain in both hardware and software to create more efficient, high performance systems capable of advanced, fast learning.
One aspect of all the efforts toward more scalable, efficient, and practical neural networks and deep learning frameworks we have been tracking here at The Next Platform is how such systems might be implemented in research and enterprise over the next ten years. One of the missing elements, at least based on the conversations that make their way into various pieces here, for such eventual end users is reducing the complexity of the training process for neural networks to make them more practically useful–and without all of the computational overhead and specialized systems training requires now. Crucial then, is a whittling down of how neural networks are trained and implemented. And not surprisingly, the key answers lie in the brain, and specifically, functions in the brain and how it “trains” its own network that are still not completely understood, even by top neuroscientists.
In many senses, neural networks, cognitive hardware and software, and advances in new chip architectures are shaping up to be the next important platform. But there are still some fundamental gaps in knowledge about our own brains versus what has been developed in software to mimic them that are holding research at bay. Accordingly, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in the U.S. is getting behind an effort spearheaded by Tai Sing Lee, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and researchers at Johns Hopkins University, among others, to make new connections between the brain’s neural function and how those same processes might map to neural networks and other computational frameworks. The project called the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICRONS).
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Feb 21, 2016
The brain starts to give up its secrets
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience
Great progress by Institute of the McGill University Health Centre has study astrocytes (the star shape brain cells) which play fundamental roles in nearly all aspects of brain function, could be adjusted by neurons in response to injury and disease.
A research team, led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in Montreal, has broken new ground in our understanding of the complex functioning of the brain. The research, which is published in the current issue of the journal Science, demonstrates that brain cells, known as astrocytes, which play fundamental roles in nearly all aspects of brain function, could be adjusted by neurons in response to injury and disease. The discovery, which shows that the brain has a far greater ability to adapt and respond to changes than previously believed, could have significant implications on epilepsy, movement disorders, and psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease.
Astrocytes are star-shaped cells in our brain that surround brain neurons, and neural circuits, protecting them from injury and enabling them to function properly – in essence, one of their main roles is to ‘baby-sit’ neurons. Our brain contains billions of cells, each of which need to communicate between each other in order to function properly. This communication is highly dependent on the behaviour of astrocytes. Until now, the mechanisms that create and maintain differences among astrocytes, and allow them to fulfill specialized roles, has remained poorly understood.
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Feb 21, 2016
Experimental drug may limit harmful effects of traumatic brain injury
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience
Very nice.
Drug appears to “dampen down” detrimental inflammatory responses without suppressing the normal functions cells need to maintain health.
Nice wireless BMI.
By eliminating the need for wires going through the brain, wireless brain machine interfaces reduce the risk of infections.
Feb 21, 2016
This Is What WIFI, Cell Phones, iPads & More Are Doing Your Child’s Brain – 100 + Scientists Are Now Petitioning The UN
Posted by Karen Hurst in categories: internet, mobile phones, neuroscience, physics
Meet the opponents of BMIs & their report.
*This article only represents a very small fraction of the research regarding the dangers associated with these devices. We encourage you to further your own research, and just wanted to provide a base to let you know that it’s something more of us need to pay attention to.
Feb 20, 2016
Mystery of Consciousness Solved – Fully and Conclusively
Posted by Sean Cusack in category: neuroscience
Of course the title is outlandishly overreacting, but the article is interesting.
Millenniums old mystery of consciousness solved by explaining how, when and why does it emerge and how subconscious and unconscious thoughts and processes influence decisions and behaviour, besides explaining causal relations of consciousness to sensations, perceptions, thoughts, awareness, attention, pain, hunger, etc. including the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.