BCI hits Nature

A rather slack-jawed article from CNN Money, over-eager and misleading, points out that the latest implanted electrode array work by Brown-affiliated Cyberkinetics was just published in Nature:

"If you think that's mind-blowing, try to wrap your head around the sensational research that's been done on the brain of one Matthew Nagle by scientists at Brown University and three other institutions, in collaboration with Foxborough, Mass.-based company Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems. The research was published for the first time last week in the British science journal Nature..."

Regrettably, they don't tell us what the basis of the publication is, since everything they mention with Nagle seems to have been done already (remote control of robot arms, learning computer/TV control, etc).  Still, good to see BCI/MMI getting some prestigious and mainstream science press.



To their lack of credit, they also mention a patent by Sony on beaming data directly into the mind using ultrasonic signals.  I seem to remember that the patent was widely derided, pure patent speculation rather than something that had been designed or built.  A DARPA scientist named Stu Wolf also mentions that headband-based interfaces are likely to be popular 20 years in the future.  Doesn't sound farfetched to me, although EEG's got a way to go.

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Neural systems are fluid, even when no learning is taking place

Brain uses both neural 'teacher' and 'tinkerer' in learning - MIT News Office

This seems to be the first publication confirming a property of the brain that's been widely suspected by neuroscientists for years, namely, that neurons change function and behavior over time:



"In earlier work, Bizzi and colleagues measured neural activities in the motor cortex while monkeys manipulated a handle to move a cursor to targets on a screen. In control experiments, the monkeys had to move the cursor to targets in the same way they had been trained. In learning experiments, the monkeys had to adapt their movements to compensate for novel forces applied to the handle.

The scientists found that even when the monkeys were performing the familiar control task, their neural activities gradually changed over the course of the session."

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Engineered memories in a petri dish

Ars Technica story and paper at Physical Review E.
A team at Tel Aviv University has managed to imprint a persistent memory state lasting days into a set of neurons:
"We show that using local chemical stimulations it is possible to imprint persisting (days) multiple memories (collective modes of neuron firing) in the activity of cultured neural networks. Microdroplets of inhibitory antagonist are injected at a location selected based on real-time analysis of the recorded activity. The neurons at the stimulated locations turn into a focus for initiating synchronized bursting events (the collective modes) each with its own specific spatiotemporal pattern of neuron firing."