Elizabeth Gilberts TED talk in Longbeach CA is at the top of my list for not only unexpected favorite speakers, but also of all time. She urges society to TRULY encourage and nurture creativity of all types and to empathize with the meaning of the time in-between moments of genius and what the so called “conduit” is going through and to be more aware of the pressures we might expect of them and put on their shoulders.

She goes on to base this very loose and metaphoric hypothesis on the last 500 years, which was when the west began to refer to the genius as themselves and not an external entity, and the decline of the artist, and how so may artists succumb to their own wits, and sometimes even by their own hands.

It doubles as words of encouragement to creative types, reaffirming that there are two parts to the creative process, your hard work and those "moments of genius". Keep doing your part, and let those moments come and go as they please.

90% perspiration and 10% inspiration creates 100% creativity.

New research in the European Journal of Pediatrics has found that breast feeding children increases IQ. In the study, conducted by Wieslay Jedrychowski and colleges, 468 babies born to non-smoking mothers were tested five times at regular intervals through preschool age. The study found that children breast fed scored significantly higher than their bottle fed counter parts. The increase in IQ was also proportionate to the length of time the children were breast fed. There was an increase of 2.1 points for three months, 2.6 points for four to six months, and 3.8 points for longer than six months.

The question to answer now is why? Researchers believe that there is nothing in the breast milk itself that causes the increase in IQ, but instead it is the interaction with the mother. When breast feeding the child participates in more than just nourishment, they are also participating in a dynamic, bidirectional, biological dialogue, says Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and noenatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine.

There is more research being done on this subject that takes into account the changes in brain white matter as children develop. There are also questions as to how much of a role parental verbal affection plays in normal development.

Source

Carrie Dykes M.A. Psychology, School Counselling Writer/Commentator

Carrie has obtained a M.A. in School Counseling with a minor in religion/philosophy from Washington State University. She plans to continue her education in the years to come

It only seems fitting that IBM (in conjuction with 5 other major universities and DARPA), the company that brought us Jeopardy champ, artificial intelligence computer, Watson, would be who brings us something straight out of science fiction novels.  

The NeuroSynaptic Chip

The first of its kind to process in the same fashion as the brain does; a “neurosynaptic core” with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons) and communication (replicated axons), all in one chip.  It’s like taking computer computation from 2-Dimentions into full 3-Dimentional space.  This attempts to overcome what is know as the “von Neumann paradigm”, the current way our present day’s computer architecture is ruled by.  Von Neumann introduced the architecture of the processer and the memory being two separate pieces of hardware in the 1940s.   By integrating the memory into the same hardware as the processor you begin to see context dependant processes in an energy efficient manor PLUS eliminating the bottle neck of the Bus…just like a brain.  

And that seems to be one of the driving forces behind IBMs new chip, is the energy efficiency, and rightly so.  They can already slap together simulate synapses and firing neuron simulations into a super computer.  But even as powerful and helpful as a super computer can be, its downfall is its size, its upkeep, its administration and the amount of energy it takes to drive.  

But as Dr. Dharmendra Modha, head of the SyNAPSE project (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), says, the brain is not a neural network, it’s a synaptic network, if you look at the junctions between neurons (called synapses’) you would see that they outnumber the number of neurons by a factor of 10,000” What DARPA has asked the team was to demonstrate at a nano scale, low power material that captures the function of the synapse.  A calculate size of 1 picojoule fitting 10,000,000,000 single synapses’ inside the space of 1 square centimeter

This interview which explains more that Dr. Modha did with Fast Company is fantastic and highly suggested.

That alone was 3 years ago.

Fast forward to today they have 2 working prototype designs, both at 45 total nanometers a piece and currently contain 256 neurons.  One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.  3 years ago, it was an idea, today, it is quite the reality.  What do you think 20 – 50 years will look like from now?

Sources IBM Press Release

Video: Fast Company interview IBM's "Brain" Guy

Images: IBM Research - Almaden

In mid-June, Professor Brian Pollard of Manchester spoke to the European Anesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam regarding a 3D real time representation of changes in electricity in the brain as it slips from consciousness using a light weight machine that can fit on a small push cart called fEITER ("functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response) in which has the capability of scanning the brain at 100 images a second, or 100fps.

As far as I have seen, this is the first time this type of real-time scan movie capture has been possible. Iva also mentioned on Facebook how this further proves Professor Susan Greenfield of Oxfords theory of the multiple levels and layers of conscience.

The images and video Professor Pollards assistant sent to me after emailing the professor last night after the conference. This video is not ours, but was given to us by the Professors Assistant when asked for it.

According to an article written on The Physics arXiv Blog entitled “Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends to 150” , your brain restricts you to on average 150 friends. 

The article explains this prediction made by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the early 90’s after monitoring social interactions amongst primates. He theorized that the volume of the brain is directly linked to the amount of people you can maintain social contact with. Obviously, when we say friend, we are not referring to everyone who “follows” you or “friends” you in social networks, but people in which you actually have a deep link with.

Bruno Goncalves and some colleagues from Indiana University were given access to Twitter for 6 months during which they reviewed 3 million Twitter users over the course of 4 years 

Their results? The average of those users monitored could keep meaningful social interactions with between 100 and 200 people, which roughly agrees with the Dunbar number of 150.

After reading the original research paper (which I encourage everyone to do) and corresponding data, I found I am curious about some of the conclusions, namely dealing with the weight (designated as ω out) as a representation of how strong a friendship is. It is calculated by a formula that takes into consideration the number of replies between 2 people in a conversation. The higher the weight, the stronger the friendship.

As seen in the graph, a maximum weight is achieved when a user has between 100 and 200 outgoing links, or simply, when a user responds to 100-200 people regularly.

In looking at the interval between 0 and 100 in which the average weight of each connection is between 5 and 6, it is interesting to see the weight seems to increase over the initial period as a user gains more contacts. This could just be an artifact of a “new user effect”, or a learning curve when a new user first starts using Twitter and not an actual result of social interaction of people with less than 100 friends.

The range of 100-200 friends is also interesting in that it just barely passes the peak weight of 6. Afterwards, the weight does not drop below 5 until almost 350 outgoing contacts, and it doesn’t stay below 5 significantly until about 500 outgoing contacts. While the peak relations as defined by the study do indeed occur between 100 and 200 friends, there is still a substantial amount of people maintaining almost as strong connections with up to 500 people.

Still, in the end the research seems to be well done, and it is interesting to see how close the Dunbar prediction is to real life scenarios. The question remains however, is this a maximum number restricted by our brains as Dunbar predicts, or will new technology and time slowly expand our social abilities?

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Chris Birkinbine is a writter and contributor for Cerebralhack and you can find his personal blog Here

It’s long been accepted by the medical community that physical exercise has a dramatic effect on brain function, it even causes neurons to be made. In fact it would represent a commercial opportunity when you start to look at studies that show the delay of the onset of Alzheimer’s and senility, this applies mainly towards general brain health and function. My particular interest is in physical activity and brain function. What I have in mind is; for an example, say we have a machine that causes physical activity, a treadmill, and we have a variety of sensors, respiration, pulse, the others could be EEG, or whatever technology we can use to monitor the brain. Obviously we cannot use an MRI, it’s too big.  Say we put this person in a virtual environment and create an immersive experience.

Put these things together with the specific goal of achieving tasks, or being successful with certain mental tasks that would otherwise seem unreachable to that person otherwise. We already know by observing MRIs the increase in oxygen levels with brain activity. There are a lot of things we can tell from observing with EEG, this technology has already been accessed for gaming head-gear and so on that can observe in some ways what’s going on. But basically if we were successful with this we would have a device that allows us to be smarter, and for me that’s a pretty interesting task.

This was the presentation Jamie Hyneman, Host of Mythbusters, gave at the VLAB “Business of the Brain” event.  

Thanks to my friend EdRabbit and one of the co-chairs for the event, Tansy Brook, Comms. Mng. @ Neurosky we got to sit-own with him and ask him a few more questions in relation to his presentation, and a tiny delve into his interest into the brain, and where he sees BCI in the future.

What are your opinions on the current technology on the market today?

This kind of thing is in its infancy, I got interested in in the application I described because we are just getting to the point where we can have a look at what’s going on from a number of different points of view with these types of different technologies.  So far, there’s been no magic bullet that can tell us everything we want to know. By the time we get done with a number of them we start to feel we are peeling away the layers of an onion.

Its great that things are starting to happen, while nobody that I’ve seen has really gotten there yet [on that kind of scale] there is enough of a format and momentum that Im starting to feel like we are on the verge onf really being able to have some really deep insights and interaction.  It’s about the right time to take a step into the right direction.

Can you expand a little more on what your idea is?

This came from my own personal experience; I work out on a treadmill when I do my design work. For me, it’s like hitting a switch. Its almost like, when Im not on my treadmill, I’m stupid. I became intrigued with that, and because of my background in linguistics and language acquisition, a lot of things fell into place. Your brain doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are a lot of interactions that go on between the body and the brain. We typically don’t pay intention to it. We associate brain work with something you do at a desk.
I look at it from an evolutionary perspective. The guy in the cave who discovered a sharp stick to hunt animals with wasn’t sitting in a cave pondering the physics of sharp sticks. He was most likely active; in the act of hunting, or mating or defense where his system was fully active, and that’s how we fully evolved. The greatest mental activity during our evolution would had to of been through heavy physical activity. It’s a largely under-investigated feature that we see from what technology we have now. It points to us being much smarter the more physically active you are.

You mentioned this stems from linguistics?

Its all about how the brain works and how it adapts into its environment. There is another direction this comes from. When thoughts are formed, and neural cascades happen….if you think of this as a pile of sand, and you drop a single gran and it causes an avalanche, that’s a idea, that’s a concept, that’s a problem that was solved. It’s not necessary, often; it’s counterproductive to move in a linear fashion as opposed to something that you are more able to morph into. Thoughts aren’t lined up in little rows of neurons, or behave that way. They are connected all over the brain.

When something coalesces into an idea, this is a result of all these different connections that help anchor this thought that helps create this pile that helps create the cascade. While it’s not relative to theoretical physics, we know from some of the studies that have been done that simply randomly moving around your arms while thinking creates additional grains of sand to this pile so to speak that allow thoughts to attach, and structures to be built that eventually precipitate into either anchoring a new concept or a new vocabulary word, or a grammatical structure, or even higher level concepts that effectively turn intuitive leaps. Simple physical activity, combined with the chemicals of the brain and the oxygenation of the brain help create these cascades that basically mean, we have completed a mental task.

So at this point for you, it’s an idea and a concept, have you been looking into your own studies?

Yup, given even the rudimentary technology we have today, we have enough to create and are in the process of creating a perfect concept with it. Ive been working with nVidia, who has provided some support with this. Their interest in this has been exploring immersive environments for a lot of their gaming projects. The gaming aspect is low hanging fruit as far as trying to test the potential of this type of technology.

What steps do you think future and current companes need to take, and where do you see them in 5yrs?

VLAB is one of the types of venues where these types of connections are being made. That’s the most important thing. We have people involved in forensics and sleep technology and even gaming, a lot of these seemingly disconnecting technologies, at some point or another one of them is going to work with the other and then we will have something coalesce from that. A lot of what we have going here is this bit about the ageing population, and brain function is something that is at the top of the list that all people are concerned about as they get older. So there are a lot of resources that can therefore be applied.

Last Tuesday, EdRabbit covered the VLAB “Business of the Brain” event for Cerebralhack, we also lined up a fantastic sit down 1 on 1 Q/A with the inventor of Brain Fingerprinting, and also built the first EEG based BCI device, Dr. Larry Farwell.  The idea of Brainfinger printing is also briefly mentioned in our interview with Dr. Michael Schuette

Ed: You built the first EEG based BCI device in 1984, what was your motivation, what drove you towards that field?

Larry: I was minding my business in my brain research lab *laughs* measuring brain responses. Getting brain response without any overt physical indication and knew of a kid in Illinois (where Dr.Farwell attended Grad school, Harvard undergrad) who was paralyzed from the eyeballs down. So he couldn’t communicate at all, but we suspected he was still awake in there, it’s called locked in syndrome. If you damage the brain in a particular way you can wipe out the motor system and still keep everything intact. We suspected that was the case with him.

We said “hey!” we could set up a system whereby he could communicate with the computer and a speech synthesizer. So I built the program and set up the system to be a brain computer interface and it worked! That was what got me involved first. Then I thought “Well if we can communicate from the brain to the computer, what else can we use this for?” Well, we can find out if someone was at a murder scene, we could find out if someone was KGB, at that time it was a KGB agent, now they are more concerned if someone’s a bomb maker, or a terrorist, we can tell what information is stored in the brain.
So I developed that system, I tried it out on some undergraduates, it worked. I often thought, if anyone discovers that undergrads brains are different than everyone else, there’s a lot of scientist that are going to be in deep trouble! *laughs* cause we get all of our results from there! So it worked I went to a scientific conference, the FBI and the CIA were there and they became interested in the technology and then acquired a million dollar contract from the CIA to further develop it, and took it from there.

Ed: Can you give a quick description how that works, your Elevator pitch type of description?

Larry: As an example let’s say we wanted to detect who the FBI agents are in a group. We flash information in front of them ONLY an FBI agent would know and/or recognize on a screen, words or pictures. Mixed in with other things

When the FBI agents see the FBI related material they experience an “ah ha!” experience. They say“ah ha!” We pick up the pattern of neural firing that is propagated to the scalp, electoral changes, EEG, Electroencephalograph, on the scalp, we pick up that pattern. We say “ok, that guy just had an “ah ha!” experience” From that we can determine who is and who isn’t an FBI agent.Similar ly we can say “that guys an Al-Qaeda trained terrorist”, “That guys a bomb maker”, “that guy was in a murder scene”. Or we can say “That guy was NOT in a murder scene, he doesn’t have the information stored in his head about the scene” The technology works both ways.

Ed: And this type of reaction isn’t something that can be suppressed by people? It’s the brain itself doing the recognition. A CIA agent for example, could you train somebody to no be prey to this sort of interrogation if the technology were set in the wrong hands?

Larry: No, you really can’t. Here’s why. Say we are in this room; we basically know what the scene is here. Door opens, an elephant coms running into the room, assuming we can see and are looking, first thing we are going to say is “Ah hah! There’s an elephant in the room now.” The first thing that will ALWAYS happen is, we recognize it as being an elephant. THEN we decide what we are going to do about it. “Maybe I’ll feed him a peanut”, “maybe I’ll exit out the back door.” that depends on what we want to do with the elephant, but the FIRST thing that happens is that we notice it. When we pick up that brain response; that “ah ha!”, when they notice the relevant stimuli, it doesn’t matter what they do, because they can only do it after what they have noticed on the screen. I invented the system, I can’t beat it. People in my own lab can’t beat it. People who wrote the programs, developed the hardware and software who know exactly how it works, can’t beat it. It’s just not a matter of choice to recognize the elephant or not.

We don’t detect surprise, we detect relevancy. We have to set up thoroughly preemptive interviews very carefully to avoid false on the subject beforehand. For example, before we run a test we verify that a witness was not at the murder scene. We verify they do not know what the murder weapon is, or what it looked like. One of these is the murder weapon; you’re going to see an ax, a rifle, a shotgun, a knife and a rope. And none of these things mean anything significant you? “No” You don’t know which one is the murder weapon? “No”. This is the context we are taking that “ah ha!” from. [But, with any positive result ] this does not absolutely prove he committed the murder, what it does prove is that there are details about it that he claimed not to know that he had no legitimate reason to know. A DNA scientist will come into a court room as say this sample which is reported to come from the murder scene matches this sample which is reported to come from the suspect, as a scientist I can say, these two samples match. As a scientist I can say that either the records stored in the brain matches the crime or it doesn’t, the rest is up for a judge and jury to decide.
Ed: One more question before we let you go here, where do you see BCI in the next 5 years?
Larry: In forensics, only about 1 or 2 percent of cases are won by DNA and finger prints, the brain is always there. Whenever someone is accused of a crime, or whenever someone is falsely accused of a crime they can say “hey wait, don’t tell me anything about it, give me a brain fingerprinting test, and I’ll show you that I don’t know the details.” So I think it will be widely used in Forensics within 5yrs.

With respect to how to detect how well the brain is functioning, Alzheimer’s s is a big issue there. Whether it will be used in 5yrs? I think it will take a little longer than that. With medical things you have to get FDA approval, medical development requirements take a while. I think that will certainly see it used first pharmaceuticals in the evaluation of drugs; a research application rather than a diagnosis application, which are easier to get approval for.

With the respect to advertising, the bar is way lower, we can already pin point when people take notice and pay attention and how much they retain, we don’t need a more precise answer.

With respect to gaming I think it’s going to be huge in 5 years, because people’s brains respond. It doesn’t have to be entirely accurate, because it’s not as if someone’s life depends on it. We would be able to make cheap easily available and easy to use systems that will provide information. So when something comes on the gaming screen, either an event that’s created by the game, or an event that’s created by the competitor, how you respond mentally to that, how your brain responds to that event will be part of your score, your experience.

That’s something that’s really fun.

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