The cerebellum is located on the underside of the brain, beside the brain stem. It plays a large part in motor control, particularly as it applies to the coordination and timing of movements. Its fairly simple neuronal structure made it less challenging to replicate, as compared to other more complex regions of the brain.

The team, led by Professor of Psychobiology Matti Mintz, started by analyzing the sensory input signals that came into a rat’s biological cerebellum from its brain stem, and the response signals that it put out in return. They were then able to replicate this signal-processing/transmitting function on a chip, which could be mounted outside the rat’s skull and wired into its brain.

They then anesthetized the rat, disabled its own cerebellum, and mounted the chip on its head. Next, they tried to teach the still-anesthetized rat a conditioned motor reflex – they subjected the rat’s eye to a puff of air accompanied by an audible tone, causing it to blink, with the idea that the rat would learn to blink its eye even when the tone was produced with no accompanying puff. While it could not learn this response when the chip was at first not connected to its brain, it was able to do so once the chip was wired in.

The chip was facilitating the same sort of response that the cerebellum would ordinarily handle.

Now, Mintz and his Tel Aviv team hope to replicate larger areas of the cerebellum, which would allow conscious test animals to learn whole sequences of response movements. It should prove challenging, as artefacts caused by the movements themselves can degrade the signal quality, although better software and improved implantation techniques could make up for that degradation.

Ultimately, the descendants of such chips could be used to restore or at least improve brain functions in stroke victims, or other people with brain damage. Mintz’s collaborator, Robert Prueckl of Austria’s Guger Technologies, believes that even brain parts such as the hippocampus or visual cortex should have artificial counterparts within several decades.

The study involved placing three subjects in an MRI scanner, and having them watch two sets of Hollywood movie trailers while in it. The fMRI was used to measure blood flow through their brains’ visual cortex, as they were watching the trailers. A computer used this data to virtually divide their brains into small three-dimensional cubes called voxels. Computer models of each voxel were then created, incorporating information about how that real-life section of the brain responded to different types of visual stimuli. In this way, the computer was able to match up specific voxel activity with specific visual patterns from the trailers – it acted as a Rosetta Stone, of sorts.

The resulting movie reconstruction algorithm was then fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, which it matched up with what should be the corresponding voxel activity. For each image in the trailers, it then chose 100 images from the YouTube videos, whose voxel activity most closely resembled that of the trailer image. These 100 images were combined into one blurry composite image, that resembled the one image from the trailer. When strung together, those composite images presented a somewhat trippy yet recognizable facsimile of the complete trailer.

So far, the system can only reconstruct movie trailers that subjects have already viewed. As the UC Berkeley technology is developed, however, it is hoped that it could be used visualize what is happening in the minds of stroke victims, coma patients, and other people not able to adequately communicate. It could also be used to improve human-computer interfaces, such as those that allow handicapped individuals to control devices using their thoughts.

The video below shows parts of the original trailers, with the reconstructions playing alongside. Below it is a video that displays images from the trailers, with some of the YouTube images that were used to create their composite equivalents.

In April, the University of Southern California made the headlines when it announced that researchers there had created a functioning synthetic synapse circuit using carbon nanotubes. Well, today IBM unveiled a new class of experimental computer chips that are designed to emulate the human brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. According to the company, "The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers."

Utilizing advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, the two prototype "neurosynaptic computing chips" are said to recreate the phenomena that takes place between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems. The idea is that such chips would be used in "cognitive computers," which would learn through experiences – like the human brain – rather than simply being programmed.

To that end, IBM has joined forces with a number of academic partners, to develop such computers through the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project. According to the company, "The goal of SyNAPSE is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment – all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage." Phases 0 through 1 have already been completed, while the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has reportedly awarded the project US$21 million in funding for Phase 2.

The two chips themselves contain no biological components. According to the press release, however, both chips do feature 256 artificial neurons, with one core containing 262,144 programmable synapses, and the other containing 65,536 learning synapses. In lab tests, the chips have so far been used to execute simple applications such as navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.

Ultimately, IBM hopes to produce a chip system featuring ten billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses, that would consume one kilowatt of power and have a volume of less than two liters (0.5 U.S. gallons).

"Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture," said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. "Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets, and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments."

Partners in Phase 2 of SyNAPSE include Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of California at Merced, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This Artificial Rat Brain Has 12 Seconds of Short-term Memory

It’s not artificial intelligence in the Turing test sense, but the technicolor ring you see above is actually an artificial microbrain, derived from rat brain cells–just 40 to 60 neurons in total–that is capable of about 12 seconds of short-term memory.

Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.

But as if the growing of a tiny, functioning, donut-shaped brain in a petri dish wasn’t enough, the team found that when they stimulate the neurons with electricity, the pulse would circulate the microbrain for a full 12 seconds. That’s roughly 12 seconds longer than they thought it would (they expected the pulse to live for about a quarter of a second).

That’s essentially short-term memory. The neurons were relaying the signal in sequence, persistently, mimicking the activity we know as working memory (though admittedly we don’t understand it that well). The brain is basically storing the stimulus long after the stimulus is no more, which is a big deal for a tiny brain grown in a dish.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a computer that has been afflicted with symptoms of schizophrenia.  Okay, so that sounds like the start to a bad science fiction movie, but it could pave the way to understanding schizophrenia better and, by extension, lead for better treatments to schizophrenics.

So here’s how it works – the research team started with a computer programmed with a neural network, nicknamed DISCERN by its creator. Unlike a regular computer program, where the computer is provided with a set of instructions, a neural network behaves like human and animal brains — in other words, it learns.

In order to model the process, [Grad student Uli] Grasemann and [Professor Risto] Miikkulainen began by teaching a series of simple stories to DISCERN. The stories were assimilated into DISCERN’s memory in much the way the human brain stores information-not as distinct units, but as statistical relationships of words, sentences, scripts and stories.

“With neural networks, you basically train them by showing them examples, over and over and over again,” says Grasemann. “Every time you show it an example, you say, if this is the input, then this should be your output, and if this is the input, then that should be your output. You do it again and again thousands of times, and every time it adjusts a little bit more towards doing what you want. In the end, if you do it enough, the network has learned.”

Once they achieved success in that manner, they then tested the computer in a way the simulates the hyperlearning hypothesis for the origin of schizophrenia. For ordinary brains, while there’s significant evidence that people do pretty much remember everything, your brain stores them differently. In particular, intense experiences, which are signaled to the brain by the presence of dopamine, are remembered differently than others. Which is why, for example, you probably can’t remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday, but you still have strong memories of your first kiss.

The hyperlearning hypothesis posits that for schizophrenics, this system of classifying experiences breaks down because of excessive levels of dopamine. Rather than classifying some memories as important and others as less essential, the brain classes everything as important. According to the hypothesis, this is what leads to schizophrenics getting trapped into seeing patterns that aren’t there, or simply drown in so many memories that they can’t focus on anything.

In order to simulate the hyperlearning hypothesis, the team put the DISCERN network back through the paces of learning, only this time, they increased its learning rate — in other words, it wasn’t forgetting as many things. They “taught” it several stories, then asked them to repeat them back. They then compared the computer’s result to the results of schizophrenic patients, as well as healthy controls.

What they discovered is that, like the schizophrenics, the DISCERN program had trouble remembering which story it was talking about, and got elements of the different stories confused with each other. The DISCERN program also showed other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as switching back and forth between third and first person, abruptly changing sentences, and just providing jumbled responses.

While this program and experiment doesn’t prove the hyperlearning hypothesis, it is suggestive and may provide researchers with a better handle on diagnosing and treating schizophrenia.

The BCMI lets you create music using nothing more than eye movement and brainwaves

Imagine a Wii that lets you play a musical instrument with your brain without touching strings or a keyboard. That’s exactly what this "proof of concept" brain-computer-music-interface (BCMI) is designed to do – it uses brain waves and eye movement to sound musical notes, so even a person with "locked-in-syndrome" could participate in creative activity analogous to learning to play a musical instrument. Developed by a team headed by Eduardo Miranda, a composer and computer music specialist from the UK’s University of Plymouth, the BCMI can be set up on a laptop computer for under $3,500 (including the computer). For people who are disabled, assistive technology usually aims at day-to-day functioning and largely ignores the unique aspect of being a human – creativity. This is different.

The Brain Computer Interface as an assistive technology

"Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness." – Julia Cameron

No-one wants to even think about it but imagine a car crash or a stroke left you totally paralyzed and your only active movements were eye movements, facial gestures and minimal head movements. If you still retain full cognitive capacity, you would have what is called locked-in syndrome, a fate some might regard worse than death. For any person with a disability, one of the biggest obstacles is that people simply assume that if your body doesn’t work, then your brain is probably not capable of much either. How much worse is this for the person isolated by locked-in syndrome?

Historically, assistive technologies have relied on the person being able to maneuver at least one part of their body. For example, an Augmented Communication Device may require them to press buttons on a keyboard that has pre-designated questions, statements or responses. These devices can be adapted in order for the buttons to be pressed with a finger, a toe, or a metal-pointer attached to their head. Pretty impressive. But what about people with locked-in syndrome who aren’t capable of such motor function other than eye movements? Most of the technology has been simply passing them by.

Technology in the form of the brain computer interface (BCI) provides hope for these and many other people because we no longer have to imagine being able to use our thoughts to control a wheelchair or a communication device. In the past decade this technology has moved increasingly from fantasy into a reality.

In 2007, Mike Hanlon wrote about "The first commercially available Brain Computer Interface" and pointed out how work in the area was focused on enabling paralyzed humans to communicate far more freely, but noted the potential to enhance everyone was not that far away. He was right. Within the last five years we have moved from the ability to point with the mind to a thought controlled cursor. And we have moved from driving wheelchairs with brainwaves to driving a car controlled by mind power.

The brain-computer-music-interface

This latest development has thrust the BCI into the world of music and creativity where, in this, its first use, the brain computer musical interface promises to enhance life immensely for those with a most severe disability, locked-in syndrome.

This is the brainchild of a team headed up by Eduardo Miranda, and the Plymouth BCMI Project [PDF]. The system is not yet wireless, but uses a laptop computer, related software, 3 electrodes and an EEG amplifier and can be built for under US$3,500.

Using brainwaves a person can almost immediately produce a full range of musical notes from this device by simply looking intently at one of four icons. These four icons are responsible for sounding pitch, rhythm, and controlling the strength and speed of the notes. Like learning to play a musical instrument, playing music with this device requires skill and learning. As the scientists note, however, this can be an attractive attribute.

With minimal practice in this proof of concept test, the person with locked-in syndrome rapidly demonstrated skill at playing and found it an enjoyable experience.

Check out what such a device can do when output from it is hooked into a piano keyboard. A practiced person has the potential to play masterful music using nothing but his or her brainwaves.

A whole new medium for creativity

Assistive technologies have made life easier for millions of people with disabilities around the globe. We have technology that can help people at home and at work; help them to communicate; help them with mobility. In fact you could say we’ve got technology for almost everything important to a person’s life, right? But until now, these technologies largely ignored the most unique aspect of being a human – creativity.

In the grand scheme of life, you probably wouldn’t say that cooking dinner for yourself or getting yourself out of bed in the morning were the things you were most proud of achieving. People want to be unique, innovative, and admired for their talents. Why else would we write books, design cars, or start our own companies? It’s in our nature to create. The BCMI promises to give a whole new medium for creativity because it can be used by anyone almost regardless of any physical disability. Inside each one of us is the untapped potential to be the next Beethoven without the agony of studying music theory or learning the piano. All you need is a brain.

Close neurological ties between reward-processing and pain-processing regions in the brain may allow love to provide effective pain relief

As science continues to unravel the mysteries of ourselves and the world around us at a furious pace, it can sometimes feel like the boffins are proving things that many of us feel we already know or take for granted. This interesting example comes from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where scientists have found that intense feelings of love are as effective at relieving pain as painkillers or even illicit drugs.

The last few decades have shown us that pain is not simply a symptom of trauma, but is a discreet disease entity in its own right that can affect the entire nervous system. Advances in neuro-imaging have allowed scientists a better look at the areas in which pain is processed, how the brain is affected and how it changes our thoughts and emotions, in an effort to create a multi-disciplinary treatment for pain.

Neuroimaging was able to link the activation of reward systems in the brain with the feelings of euphoria and contentment that are often distinguished by the early stages of a relationship. With Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) they found that the area of the brain that processes pain and the area of the brain that is involved in reward-processing are situated close together. Close neurological ties between the two areas meant activation of the reward-processing area could affect the pain-processing area.

Stanford study

Fifteen lovesick individuals were tested in the first nine months of their relationship. They were subjected to moderate and high thermal pain, and shown pictures of their partner, pictures of another attractive and familiar friend, and underwent a word-association task designed to be distracting. Both the partner pictures and distraction technique reported a significant reduction in pain, or analgesia, and only the partner pictures activated the brain’s reward-processing areas; the caudate head, nucleus accumbens, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

The study suggests that neural activation of the reward-processing areas via non-pharmacological means could be a powerful action on the pain experience, and could help future work with pain management in humans.

"When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study. "We’re beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation."

Other studies running concurrently are using brain imaging to train patients to control the experience of pain; to identify the changes in the brain experienced during chronic pain that amplify the pain experience, and how to reverse them; to examine distraction techniques as a viable method of pain management; to study pain-processing via the spinal cord; the use of neurotoxins as a novel method of pain management; the use of intravenous lidocaine as an effective pain relief; the pain experience and contributing factors; and sensitization to pain following repeated use of opiates.

The study was published online in PLoS ONE.

We all know that certain pieces of music can evoke strong emotional responses in people. Now, a research team from Canada’s McGill University has uncovered evidence that reveals exactly what causes such feelings of euphoria and ecstasy and why music is so important in human society. Using a combination of brain scanning technologies, the study has shown that the same neurotransmitter which is associated with feeling pleasure from sex and food is released in the brain when listening to good music.

That humans can derive intense pleasure from such things as food, drugs, money and sex is well known. All of these feelings of reward generally involve the activity of a certain neurotransmitter in the brain – dopamine. It’s a mechanism that’s necessary for survival, caused by psychoactive drugs or by tangible items which offer secondary rewards of some kind.

Abstract external stimuli, like music or art, can often trigger heightened pleasure responses in people, even though they can’t be thought of as vital for survival or the result of conditioned reinforcement. They are perceived as being rewarding rather than actually having a direct or chemical influence.

Music’s effect on our emotional state is, of course, also well-known – as witnessed by the increase in our population as result of recordings by Barry White or Etta James, or the floods of tears accompanying a moving piece from Bach or Beethoven. Previous neuroimaging studies have hinted that the emotion and reward circuits in the brain have a lot to do with the sensations experienced when listening to good music.

Researchers Valorie N. Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain Dagher and Dr. Robert Zatorre from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology have now provided direct evidence.

Even though we know what pleasure is, it’s a phenomenon that’s difficult to assess objectively. However, highly pleasurable experiences often result in noticeable physiological symptoms like changes in electrodermal activity, heart rate, respiration and so on – this "chills" response can therefore be measured. This measurement can be used to determine the exact moment of heightened pleasure, to help pinpoint what’s going on in the brain when the chills response kicks in.

As musical tastes vary considerably, participants in the study were asked to choose their own pieces of highly pleasurable music. Volunteers were also asked to identify a piece of neutral music for control purposes, that was not unpleasant but didn’t elicit any sort of heightened emotional response. Music used in the study included classical works by Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovsky, film scores from A Clockwork Orange and Kill Bill, Flamenco guitar by Rodrigo Y Gabriela and rock from Led Zeppelin, as well as jazz, blues, techno and folk.

Each volunteer went through two testing sessions, one with the neutral music and one with the pleasure music of choice. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) brain imaging revealed increased endogenous dopamine transmission during the pleasure session compared to the neutral session, confirming the association between musical enjoyment and dopamine release in the mesolimbic and mesostriatal reward systems. The research team also wanted to discover whether the release of dopamine was associated with the actual reward of listening to music or from the anticipation of what’s to come.

PET does not give the kind of temporal resolution necessary for the examination of this kind of distinction, so the team also sought the help of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine. During the fMRI stage of the testing, volunteers were asked to indicate when they experienced peak emotional responses to the same pieces of music. This information was then used to identify anticipations and peak experience time points.

The results showed that the release of dopamine was not constant throughout the whole piece but restricted to moments prior to and during peak moments. Activity was found to fire in the caudate region of the brain when the listener anticipated the emotional high, whereas during the experience itself, dopamine release was concentrated in the striatum system.

"Music is unique in the sense that we can measure all reward phases in real-time, as it progresses from baseline neutral to anticipation to peak pleasure all during scanning," says lead investigator Salimpoor. "It is generally a great challenge to examine dopamine activity during both the anticipation and the consumption phase of a reward. Both phases are captured together online by the PET scanner, which, combined with the temporal specificity of fMRI provides us with a unique assessment of the distinct contributions of each brain region at different time points."

The experiments are said to "provide the first direct evidence that the intense pleasure experienced to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system, including both dorsal and ventral striatum." They further show that the anticipation of sonic pleasure also results in reward systems being activated, and that the activity is concentrated in a different area of the brain than the actual experience.

Electricity Helps Neurons Fire Faster

With just 15 minutes of a barely perceptible electric current passed through the brain, scientists at the University of Oxford have succeeded in improving a person’s math abilities with an effect lasting as long as six months. Using a non-invasive method known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), the scientists passed a mild electric current through the skull into the brain’s parietal lobe, where numbers are processed.

Patients were asked to learn new symbols to represent numbers, then, while they were on TDCS, they attempted to organize the numbers. Participants whose brains were being stimulated demonstrated an improved ability to perform the task. The amazing part is that, when tested again six months later, they retained their higher performance level. The current helps the affected nerves to fire more quickly, making it easier to learn information.

The next trials will involve patients who have lower-than-average number processing skills, and Oxford scientists hope to one day develop a device to deliver TDCS. While it may be some time before such brain-zapping is widely administered, this treatment could help the significant portion of the population (nearly 20 percent) with moderate to severe math disability, and possibly those with difficulty in other subjects as well.

A dozen subjects with their brains wired up to a computer interface have succeeded in manipulating onscreen images using only the power of thought

Using just the power of thought to control onscreen computer activity, subjects in a recent study led by neurosurgery professor Itzhak Fried, M.D., Ph.D have managed to choose to bring one of two merged images into sharp focus while making the other disappear. Not only were only a few brain cells found to be used when selecting one picture over another, but each cell appeared to have its own image preference.

In the study, 12 epileptic subjects had fine wires implanted in their brains to record seizure activity. The researchers concentrated their efforts on the area of the brain known for memory and the ability to recognize complex images, the medial temporal lobe. With the brain recordings being monitored by computer equipment, the subjects were asked to look at two superimposed pictures of familiar objects, places, animals or people and to concentrate on just one of the images, to try and make it fully visible and the other image faded away. Every one-tenth of one second, the display screen was refreshed with input from the brain.

The research team "first identified four brain cells with preferences for celebrities or familiar objects, animals or landmarks, and then targeted the recording electrodes to those cells." It was found that individual cells appeared to have image preferences, one taking a shine to a picture of Marilyn Monroe while another might prefer Michael Jackson.

Success in the image-switching game was found to depend on the subject’s ability to "power up cells that preferred the target image and suppress cells that preferred the non-target image," with subjects managing to achieve a 70 per cent success rate over almost 900 attempts.

The research was undertaken to try and get a better understanding of how the brain works but thought-controlled computing holds the promise of helping paralyzed individuals to communicate or control prosthetic limbs. Dr. Debra Babcock, a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), said that "the remarkable aspects of this study are that we can concentrate our attention to make a choice by modulating so few brain cells and that we can learn to control those cells very quickly."

The study, which had part of its funding supplied by NINDS and the National Institute of Mental Health, has now been published in Nature, entitled "On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons".