The latest Encephalon is up over at Brain In A Vat. This issue includes herpes related Alzheimer’s, brain structure of ADHD patients, language in infants and debunking of pseudoscience. Great issue, chock full of interesting articles. Go check it out.

Neuroscience and human behavior still remain mainly a mystery. Because of that, they have accrued an unusually high number of theories. Take any intro to psychology class to see the diversity and breadth of theories that supposedly explain human behavior. So hey, why not add one more?

Two Carnegie Mellon scientists have come up with a new theory, this one based off a computational slant. I haven’t read their paper yet (saving that for my 5 hour layover in Detroit later this week) but the press release makes me dubious. Their theory involves regions of the brain “volunteering” themselves for tasks. When a primary region is damaged, lesser apt regions volunteer to take the load and restore partial function. This mimics how the brain recovers from damage by switching brain activity to a undamaged region.

I’ll withhold criticism until I read the paper, but it sounds far too simplistic. I highly doubt the regions in our brain are volunteering on a moment-to-moment basis over who can perform which task. Plus, I doubt their model incorporates regions growing or expanding, rather than just being damaged or not. And I doubt it includes the capability to incorporate new regions.

Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Marcel Just and Stanford postdoctoral fellow Sashank Varma have put forward a new computational theory of brain function that provides answers to one of the central questions of modern science: How does the human brain organize itself to give rise to complex cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving and spatial reasoning? Just and Varma’s theory, called 4CAPS, is described in the fall issue of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

[...]

Just and Varma, however, propose that the evidence reveals a more complex picture in which thinking is a network function — a collaboration of several brain areas that is constantly adapting itself, based on the task at hand and the brain’s own resources and biological limitations. The collaborating parts of the brain, according to Just, are like members of a sports team whose players substitute in and out of the action. 4CAPS (an acronym for Capacity Constrained Concurrent Cortical Activation-based Production System), proposes a decentralized process by which members of the cortical team volunteer themselves when their strengths are called for, but also permits less efficient but capable members to step forward when the primary player is injured or disabled, as might occur as a result of a stroke. Just and Varma have constructed a number of computational models to demonstrate this process, such as a model that understands English sentences.

Here is a short but sweet report regarding neural progenitors that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Previous work from this lab showed that neural progenitors could be implanted into the brains of mice and help recover function after stroke. They showed that the implanted progenitors had migrated into the stroke region. This study is an extension of the previous work and attempted to determine if migration was due to a signal provoked by a stroke.

More details after the jump.
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Suffice to say, I’m stoked. This has been a good last two weeks in terms of seminars. First Cori Bargmann stops by to talk to us about her fascinating work on C. Elegans, then Kathryn Anderson shows up and gives a wonderful talk on her recent work. Now, when I didn’t think life could get any better, Jeff Hawkins is coming to town. It’s like Christmas, but with more neuroscience and less fruitcake.

RPI: News & Events - Rensselaer To Host Lecture by PalmPilot Inventor Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins, best known as the co-founder of the Palm and Handspring companies and as the architect of computing products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone, will be on the Rensselaer campus Wednesday, Nov. 14 to discuss a new technology platform based on a theory of the human neocortex.
Jeff Hawkins

It will also be webcast live at: the Vollmer Fries Lecture Web site. Be sure to check it out, Jeff Hawkins is one of the movers and shakers of the artificial intelligence field. He has some interesting theories (presented in his book, On Intelligence). Some I agree with, others I don’t. it should be an interesting lecture. I’ll post my notes afterwards.

The brain is a complicated place and one small mutation could set things on fire. Epilepsy is an excellent example. There is no single gene that is the source of epilepsy. Rather, epilepsy can develop from any number of mutations that affect the various processes in the brain. But what happens when you have multiple mutations for known epilepsy genes? Recent research shows two mutations that actually compliment each other to restore normal function.

More details after the jump.
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The latest Encephalon is up at The Primate Diaries. Articles include a cool new imaging technique called “Brainbow”, immune system linked anxiety and Asperger’s correlation to sleep disorders.

Everyone knows there are magnetic fields all over the earth. It is how your compass works. For the first time a map Earth’s entire magnetic field has been made.

The first global map of magnetic peculiarities - or anomalies - on Earth has been assembled by an international team of researchers.

Magnetic anomalies are caused by differences in the magnetisation of the rocks in the Earth’s crust.

The magnetic signature of the Earth’s crust has been measured for many decades by a multitude of groups; but now, for the first time, the data has been combined to give a truly worldwide view of the phenomenon.

It would be interesting if some enterprising avian researcher would combine this magnetic information with migration charts of migratory birds. Birds are well known for their magnetoreception, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation to magnetic “landmarks” and migratory paths.

More information on the project can be seen at the project home - World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map

Arizona State University is making some great advances in the field of nanotechnology electronic storage. Their new technique is called programmable metallization cell (PMC). It is apparently one tenth cheaper than equivalently sized flash drives and a whopping 10,000 times more energy efficient. Put together, this means you can have tremendously small storage capacities in tiny packages which use equally tiny amounts of energy.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The first thing that came to my mind while reading this was potential neural applications. Imagine taking this tiny storage unit and coupling it with a paper thin battery. Throw in a “Utah” electrode arrays and you have a portable brain imaging implant that can hold hours, days, weeks worth of information. This could be excellent for research in a number of areas, from behavior studies to epilepsy treatment.

The article describes how a terrabyte of information could be stored on a thumbdrive. Imagine how much could be stored on the size of a pin, or a sliver of paper. More than enough for an implant. A mouse could receive one of these paper thin implants and perform some behavioral test (such as running a maze).

Researchers would have an exact readout of the brain areas selected coresponding to time. Include a transmitter in the implant to get data back off the device and you have a mouse that can perform any number of tests and provide excellent data without the need for bulky or interfering equipment.

Hat tip Foresight Nanotech Instititute.

It seems like I’ve got an artistic theme going, so this news article fits in nicely. A study published in Neuropsychologia shows that creative thinkers actually have altered brain activity when compared to others. This occurs both during normal, resting state and while solving problems.

One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.

Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.

BPR3 has published the official icons. If you are a blogger, these allow you to identify which of your posts are about peer-reviewed articles. If you are a reader, these let you know that the blogger has read the original publication and isn’t just spewing pre-processed information from the mainstream media.

For more information, check out the announcement.

Currently, the only aggregation of these posts are by hand or using a crude Technorati search. Fret not though, we are rolling out the aggregation soon! As soon as I can finish it, that is. I’ve been making good progress and have a rough working prototype finished. Once we polish off a few more features we plan to roll it out to some beta-testers, then distribute for mass consumption.

Keep an eye out here or at BPR3 for more details as they come.