BCI Allows Locked-In People To Communicate

Patients suffering from complete paralysis, but with preserved awareness, cognition, and eye movements and blinking are classified as having locked-in syndrome. If eye movements are also lost, the condition is referred to as completely locked-in syndrome. In the trial, patients with completely locked-in syndrome were able to respond "yes" or "no" to spoken questions, by thinking the answers. A non-invasive brain-computer interface detected their responses by measuring changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. The results overturn previous theories that postulate that people with completely locked-in syndrome lack the goal-directed thinking necessary to use a brain-computer interface and are, therefore, incapable of communication. Extensive investigations were carried out in four patients with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) -- a progressive motor neuron disease that leads to complete destruction of the part of the nervous system responsible for movement.

The researchers asked personal questions with known answers and open questions that needed "yes" or "no" answers including: "Your husband's name is Joachim?" and "Are you happy?." They found the questions elicited correct responses in seventy percent of the trials. Researchers found that all four patients they tested were able to answer the personal questions they asked them, using their thoughts alone. The question "Are you happy?" resulted in a consistent "yes" response from the four people, repeated over weeks of questioning. The brain-computer interface in the study used near-infrared spectroscopy combined with electroencephalography (EEG) to measure blood oxygenation and electrical activity in the brain. While other brain-computer interfaces have previously enabled some paralyzed patients to communicate, near-infrared spectroscopy is, so far, the only successful approach to restore communication to patients suffering from completely locked-in syndrome.

More information:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131150158.htm

How the Brain Resets During Sleep

Striking electron microscope pictures from inside the brains of mice suggest what happens in our own brain every day: Our synapses – the junctions between nerve cells – grow strong and large during the stimulation of daytime, then shrink by nearly 20 percent while we sleep, creating room for more growth and learning the next day. When a synapse is repeatedly activated during waking, it grows in strength, and this growth is believed to be important for learning and memory. According to “synaptic homeostasis hypothesis” (SHY), however, this growth needs to be balanced to avoid the saturation of synapses and the obliteration of neural signaling and memories. Sleep is believed to be the best time for this process of renormalization, since when asleep we pay much less attention to the external world and are free from the here and now. When synapses get stronger and more effective they also become bigger, and conversely they shrink when they weaken. Thus, researchers reasoned that a direct test of SHY was to determine whether the size of synapses changes between sleep and wake. To do so, they used a method with extremely high spatial resolution called serial scanning 3D electron microscopy.

The research itself was a massive undertaking, with many research specialists working for four years to photograph, reconstruct, and analyze two areas of cerebral cortex in the mouse brain. They were able to reconstruct 6,920 synapses and measure their size. The team deliberately did not know whether they were analyzing the brain cells of a well-rested mouse or one that had been awake. When they finally broke the code and correlated the measurements with the amount of sleep the mice had during the six to eight hours before the image was taken, they found that a few hours of sleep led on average to an 18 percent decrease in the size of the synapses. These changes occurred in both areas of the cerebral cortex and were proportional to the size of the synapses. The scaling occurred in about 80 percent of the synapses but spared the largest ones, which may be associated with the most stable memory traces. This shows, in unequivocal ultrastructural terms, that the balance of synaptic size and strength is upset by wake and restored by sleep. It is remarkable that the vast majority of synapses in the cortex undergo such a large change in size over just a few hours of wake and sleep.

More information:

http://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-brain-reset-6047/

High Visual Computing Event 2017

Between the 1st Feb to 4th Feb 2017, I attended the fourth meeting of the Czech and Slovak computer graphics and computer vision people called High Visual Computing (HiVisComp). The event took place in the Beskydy mountains in Czech Republic.

The goal of the meeting was to encourage exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners in the fields of computer graphics and computer vision from across the Czech and Slovak Republics and beyond.

More information:

http://www.hiviscomp.cz/

Big Brain, Big Data

As big brain-mapping initiatives go, Taiwan's might seem small. Scientists there are studying the humble fruit fly, reverse-engineering its brain from images of single neurons. Their efforts have produced 3D maps of brain circuitry in stunning detail. Researchers need only a computer mouse and web browser to home in on individual cells and zoom back out to intertwined networks of nerve bundles. The wiring diagrams look like colorful threads on a tapestry, and they're clear enough to show which cell clusters control specific behaviors. By stimulating a specific neural circuit, researchers can cue a fly to flap its left wing or swing its head from side to side.

But even for such a small creature, it has taken the team a full decade to image 60,000 neurons, at a rate of 1 gigabyte per cell, and that's not even half of the nerve cells in the Drosophila brain. Using the same protocol to image the 86 billion neurons in the human brain would take an estimated 17 million years, Chiang reported at the meeting. Other technologies are more tractable. So it goes in the world of neurobiology, where big data is truly, epically big. Despite advances in computing infrastructure and data transmission, neuroscientists continue to grapple with their version of the 'big data' revolution that swept the genomics field decades ago.

More information:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuroscience-big-brain-big-data/

Visual Computing Trends 2017

On the 26^th January 2017 I attended the Visual Computing Trends Symposium 2017, which took place at VRVis in Vienna, Austria. The symposium provided an overview of future developments in Visual Computing by top-level invited experts.

The topics were: “The Future of Big Data Visualization”, “The Future of Social Robots: Will they become our Companions of Tomorrow?”, “The Future of Computational Reality” and “"Is Simulation (still) the Future of Rendering, or will it be Capture and Learning?"”.

More information:

http://www.vrvis.at/newsroom/events/vct2017/

Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia

A steady stream of nicotine normalizes genetically-induced impairments in brain activity associated with schizophrenia, according to new research involving the University of Colorado Boulder. The finding sheds light on what causes the disease and why those who have it tend to smoke heavily. Researchers envision their work could lead to new non-addictive, nicotine-based treatments for some of the 51 million people worldwide who suffer from the disease. The study found that when mice with schizophrenic characteristics were given nicotine daily, their sluggish brain activity increased within two days. Within one week it had normalized. The international team of scientists set out to explore the underlying causes of 'hypofrontality' (a reduction of neuronal firing in the prefrontal cortex of the brain). Hypofrontality is believed to be the root cause of many of the signature cognitive problems experienced by schizophrenics, including trouble paying attention, remembering things, making decisions and understanding verbal explanations. Previous genome-wide association studies have suggested that people with a variation in a gene called CHRNA5 are more likely to have schizophrenia, but the mechanism for that association has remained unclear. People with that variant are also more likely to smoke.

Eighty to 90 percent of people with schizophrenia smoke and most are very heavy smokers, a fact that has long led researchers to suspect they are self-medicating. For the study, the researchers set out to answer several questions: Does a variant in the CHRNA5 gene lead to hypofrontality. If so, how? And does nicotine somehow interrupt this effect? Eighty to 90 percent of people with schizophrenia smoke and most are very heavy smokers, a fact that has long led researchers to suspect they are self-medicating. To do so, the research team first took mice with the CHRNA5 gene variant and used state-of-the-art brain imaging technologies to see if they had hypofrontality. Then researchers, conducted behavioral tests to see if the mice shared key characteristics of schizophrenics, like being unable to suppress a startle response and being averse to social interaction. The results validated that the gene variant likely plays a role in schizophrenia by causing hypofrontality. Nicotine appeared to reverse this in the mice, normalizing brain activity by acting on nicotinic receptors in regions of the brain key to healthy cognitive function. Because hypofrontality is also associated with addiction and other psychiatric conditions, the research could ultimately have broad applications for drug development in the mental health field.

More information:

http://neurosciencenews.com/schizophrenia-nicotine-brain-activity-5995/

Video Games Help Men to Cope with Stress

A new study conducted by University College London reveals that video games are one of the most popular ways for men to cope with stress. The hobby has been maligned in the mainstream media with undue and unwarranted coverage of 'GamerGate', with much of the gaming media themselves promoting the narrative that the players themselves are holding back the medium with allegations of misogyny and sexism. But this new study aims to demonstrate how men and women show significant differences in therapy, coping behavior and help-seeking. It notes that men in general are less inclined than women to seek help for their psychological needs.

It indicates that a significant percentage of male participants (29%) listed video games as a main coping strategy, with women trailing behind slightly at 18%. In contrast, more than half (52%) of female participants listed prescription pills to deal with hard times, with only 27% of men listing it as a coping method. Both genders rate “talking with friends” as their primary way to cope. The research serves as a strong rebuke to those who claim that video games carry no social purpose, especially for men and a significant percentage of women, many of whom play online video games for both social interaction and relaxation.

More information:

http://heatst.com/gaming/study-video-games-are-among-the-most-popular-ways-for-men-to-cope-with-stress/?mod=sm_fb_ad

A Wolverine-Inspired Material

Scientists, including several from the University of California, Riverside, have developed a transparent, self-healing, highly stretchable conductive material that can be electrically activated to power artificial muscles and could be used to improve batteries, electronic devices, and robots. The findings, which represent the first time scientists have created an ionic conductor, meaning materials that ions can flow through, that is transparent, mechanically stretchable, and self-healing. The material has potential applications in a wide range of fields. It could give robots the ability to self-heal after mechanical failure; extend the lifetime of lithium ion batteries used in electronics and electric cars; and improve biosensors used in the medical field and environmental monitoring.

This project brings together the research areas of self-healing materials and ionic conductors. self-healing materials repair damage caused by wear and extend the lifetime, and lower the cost, of materials and devices. Researchers developed an interest in self-healing materials because of his lifelong love of Wolverine, the comic book character who has the ability to self-heal. Ionic conductors are a class of materials with key roles in energy storage, solar energy conversion, sensors, and electronic devices. Ionic conductors can be used to power artificial muscles and to create transparent loudspeakers -- devices that feature several of the key properties of the new material but none of these devices additionally had the ability to self-heal from mechanical damage.

More information:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161225231953.htm