Cognitive Labs

Upload your memories. If you don't like them, swap them with someone else.

Tagged memories will be available by topic to make searching easy.

Will a subscription model work? Or should it be more like your favorite downloadable media service?

At a fictitious brain.com type site, you'll be able to remember anything... wholesale. It may not be impossible after all, or at least, much more possible than people think today...

hint: think more 'gaming' and game-theory than 'neuroscience' - which is a fuzzy topic and means 1,000 different things to 1,000 experts depending on their academic specialty.

Labels: brain, dick, tagged, wholesale

Inset: image of planet Fomalhaut b orbiting star Fomalhaut

UC Berkeley and LLNL astronomers led by Paul Kalas and Eugene Chiang have taken the first optical picture of a planet outside the solar system, with collaboration from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and JPL in Pasadena.

The planet, with a mass of no more than 3 Jupiters and a likely Saturn-like ring system, orbits the star Fomalhaut (Arabic: fum al-hawt فم الحوت or 'mouth of the whale') in the constellation Piscis Austrinis, 25 light years away. Fomalhaut has a diameter 1.7 times that of the sun and is only 300 million years old, compared to an estimated 5 billion for the sun. Over the past decade, exoplanet hunting has become an intriguing new field, with the presence of planets mostly detected through careful measurements of radial velocity. In 2007, the first-ever spectroscopy of exoplanets commenced with HD209458b in Pegasus, where the planetary spectrum could be resolved against the overwhelming glare of its sun.

It's now believed that those stars with heavier elements in their spectra (e.g., iron) will have a corresponding greater likelihood of earth or mars-like solid planets, leading to a vast potential for discovery using well established spectroscopic techniques coupled with more powerful telescopes to probe the basic DNA of stars and accompanying planetary systems without ever leaving earth.

Fomalhaut has appeared frequently in fiction and also in the RPG Final Fantasy as the nomenclature referring to a class of lasergun. Berkeley-native and writer Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, etc.) believed that he periodically was in receipt of communications beamed from Fomalhaut's then-unknown planetary system which he imagined exerted a matrix-like control over earth. Interestingly, Ursula K. LeGuin, daughter of UC-Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (studies of Ishi, the last 'wild Indian') wrote a novel, Rocannon's World, speculatively set on the second planet of Fomalhaut, which of course, happens to be known as Fomalhaut b today - and has now been photographed.

Labels: acid blockers, chiang, dick, exoplanet, fomalhaut, hd209458b, kalas, leguin, radial, rocannon, spectroscopy, valis, velocity

-from National Geographic and Nature




A new computer program can match brain activity with visual images and even predict what people are seeing, a study has shown.

The work raises the possibility that one day computers could "read" a person's brain to digitally re-create memories, dreams, or imaginings.

Previous attempts to decode vision in this way could only extract simple information about images, such as their physical orientation, and could not identify images that participants were seeing for the first time.

"Our technique overcomes this limitation, and we show that we can perform identification for novel images," said study team member Kendrick Kay of the University of California, Berkeley.

The new computer model is described in the journal Nature.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the visual cortices of participants' brains as they looked at photographs of animals, food, people, and other common objects.

The fMRI technique is a relatively new way to measure changes in the brain's blood oxygen levels, which have strong links to neural activity.

The collected data were used to "teach" a computer program to associate certain blood flow patterns with particular kinds of images.

Participants were then asked to look at a second set of images they had never encountered before.

The model was programmed to take what it had learned from the previous pairings and figure out what was being shown in the new set of images.

For a collection of 120 images, the model correctly identified what a person was looking at 90 percent of the time. When the set was enlarged to a thousand images, accuracy was about 80 percent.

Brain Readers

The researchers say their work opens the door for brain-reading devices—like those envisioned by Philip K. Dick and other science-fiction writers—that display a person's inner visual experiences on a screen.

Before such a device can be built, however, researchers must first answer important questions about dreams, memories, and imagination.

(Related: "First Ever Brain 'Atlas' Completed [September 26, 2006].)

"Perhaps the contents of our imaginations are not represented in the same way as the contents of our actual real perceptions," Kay said.

"In this case, we will have to investigate how imagination is represented and construct appropriate computational models."

Technology will have to improve as well.

Many critics of fMRI point out that the technique does not measure brain activity directly. As a result, it lacks the resolution of data recorded directly from brain cells.

Small Step

Frank Tong, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, said he was surprised that the team's method worked as well as it did for this very reason.

"Most people think of fMRI as a pretty crude method, but [the data collected] contained a surprising amount of information, enough to predict, well above [the level of mere] chance, which of several hundred or thousand pictures a person was looking at," said Tong, who was not involved in the study.

The work also builds on other groundbreaking studies, including research reported last year in the journal Current Biology, in which researchers were able to decode the simple intentions of participants about 70 percent of the time based on fMRI readings.

Robert Dougherty, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, said the construction of a brain-reading device might be possible, but he cautions that the team's new model is only a small step toward that goal.

"Their model is not invertible—it cannot generate a unique image from the measured brain activity," Dougherty added.

"However, combined with strong assumptions about natural image statistics, a more sophisticated model could produce such images that would be a prediction of a subject's visual imagery."

A brain-reading device would be valuable for probing phenomena that are difficult to study using conventional means, such the differences in perception among people, the researchers said.

But the team notes that such a device could be used for more sinister purposes as well.

The privacy and ethical concerns associated with a brain-reading device would parallel those surrounding human genome sequencing, the researchers said.

In both cases, care will need to be taken so that the rights of individuals are not violated.

"The authors believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent," the team wrote in a statement.

Labels: cat, dick, kendrick, mind_games, minds, vision