Looking at the brain... seeing the mind

• Neuromancer, by William Gibson: one of the granddaddies of the cyberpunk movement, this SF sub-genre redefined the brain-machine interface. Other stories of his that tread on this ground: Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
• Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams: a similar take on brain-machine interfaces (and generally a cool read).
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, by Philip K. Dick: The basis for the 1990 film Total Recall, this had to do with implanting memories and questioning the nature of what's real. The Minority Report had machines able to read the visions of certain "gifted" folk, while Paycheck had memory themes as well...
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Charlie Kaufman: another adventure in memory manipulation, perception and questioning reality...
• Brainstorm, by Philip Frank Messina, Robert Stitzel and Bruce Joel Rubin (story): A fantastic flick about the recording of sensation directly from the brain and playing it back. It also shows the progression of technology from clunky prototype to streamlined final version. It gives a fair shake to the possibilities of the tech, both good and bad.
• Strange Days, by James Cameron: On a similar note as Brainstorm, Strange Days looks at the use and abuse of recorded sensation.

'Spectrum of empathy' found in the brain
17:00 18 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper

Ever wondered how some people can “put themselves into another person's shoes” and some people cannot? Our ability to empathise with others seems to depend on the action of "mirror neurons" in the brain, according to a new study.

Mirror neurons, known to exist in humans and in macaque monkeys, activate when an action is observed, and also when it is performed. Now new research reveals that there are mirror neurons in humans that fire when sounds are heard. In other words, if you hear the noise of someone eating an apple, some of the same neurons fire as when you eat the apple yourself.

So-called auditory mirror neurons were known only in macaques. To determine if they exist in humans Valeria Gazzola, at the school of behavioural and cognitive neurosciences neuroimaging centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues, put 16 volunteers into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and observed their brains as they were played different noises.

The volunteers heard noises such as a sheet of paper being torn, or of someone crunching potato chips. Then the same subjects were scanned again, this time whilst tearing a piece of paper, or eating potato chips.

Vicarious crunching

“We combined the data from listening and execution and looked to see if the activity in the brain overlaps,” says Gazzola’s colleague Christian Keysers, also at the University of Groningen. Sure enough, it did overlap. Motor neurons associated with mouth actions (crunching) and hand actions (ripping) were activated in both cases...

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Brain's action center is all talk

Collaboration between USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Italian University finds strong mental link between actions and words

Neuroscience is tackling a problem that obsessed Hamlet: What is the difference in our minds between talk and action?

Less than you would expect, an international research group reports in the Sept. 19 issue of Current Biology.

The brain's premotor cortex shows the same activity pattern when subjects observe an action as when they hear words describing the same action, the study's authors said.

"If you hear the word 'grasp,' it's actually the premotor cortex that's active, not just a separate, abstract semantic area in the brain," said lead investigator Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor of occupational sciences with a joint appointment in the Brain and Creativity Institute of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

The premotor cortex has long been identified as a center of activity for actions. The notion that it could also process verbal descriptions of those actions has met some resistance.

"Neuroscience is coming around to this idea, but there hasn't been much data supporting it," Aziz-Zadeh said.

To change that, Aziz-Zadeh recruited 12 volunteers and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the same areas of the premotor cortex in the same subject as the person observed an action and heard language describing the action.

The premotor area involved during observation of a specific action, such as kicking, also lit up when the subject heard the corresponding word. This was the first study to make such a direct comparison, Aziz-Zadeh said.

Other studies found activity in the same areas during execution of an action, Aziz-Zadeh added, offering indirect evidence for the existence of "mirror neuron" systems that activate both when a person performs a task and when the person watches someone else perform the task.

"The study does demonstrate the intimate linkage between the way we talk about actions and the neural machinery that supports those actions. That's very intriguing," said USC University Professor Michael Arbib...

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TheIT said:

...My fantasy WIP is exploring similiar ideas, though I'm using magic rather than science. My MC is an out of control touch empath and doesn't know it. She can "share" what other people are feeling through touch. I'm also exploring an idea where two people who can wield magic can "share minds" to learn from each other via magic. It's not telepathy, more of a way to feel how the other person moves or wields the power. The first article with the "mirror-neurons" is very much what I had in mind.

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TheIT said:

The second article brings up a good point about action language affecting listeners. As writers, it certainly lends support to using active language to provoke a response in readers.

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• Demolition Man, by Peter M. Lenkov (story), Robert Reneau (story), Daniel Waters (screenplay), Robert Reneau (screenplay) and Peter M. Lenkov(screenplay): A bit of B-movie fluff, it was still good for a laugh and some colorful characters. For our purposes, while prisoners were incarcerated in a type of semi-suspended animation, skills and behavioral traits were implanted. It had Sly Stallone impulsively knitting (while the inside-job badguys woke with all kinds of nefarious skills). In this respect, an interesting bit of SF snuck into an action movie...
• The Matrix, by Larry and Andy Wachowski: This one takes the machine-brain interface to a whole new level, with the general population living a simulation virtually indistinguishable from real life. Not sure if it's original, but the execution of the idea was awesome. On a slightly lower level (though closer to practicality) is instant skill/knowledge downloading to a brain. Neo, the main character, is trained to fight at expert levels in a dozen different styles in about two minutes. Finding himself needing to pilot a helicopter, he learns with a quick call to home base. Man, that would make school so much quicker...

Brain Area Foils Fear

The human brain must constantly screen incoming stimuli for relevance. Without such screening, the brain would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer number of stimuli we experience every day. Some of the most profound stimuli--such as other people's faces--trigger an emotional response, but there are times when fear or even happiness must be kept at bay as the brain works to solve a problem. New research has shown how the brain goes about accomplishing this task.

The brain structure known as the amygdala plays a key role in generating and perpetuating emotions such as fear by sending signals into the hypothalamus, which controls the sympathetic nervous system. The amygdala's neighbors in the brain include the anterior cingulate cortex, which neuroscientists think controls various so-called executive processes, such as deciding where attention should be focused. The rostral region of this portion of the cortex (the area on the bottom toward the front) connects directly with the amygdala, and some had speculated that the former might play a role in monitoring emotional states, allowing them to flourish when appropriate but suppressing them when not.

Designing a test of this hypothesis, however, had proved challenging. Amit Etkin of Stanford University and his colleagues turned to a classic study of conflict in the brain--the Stroop task--in which the name of a color and the color of the letters in that name either match or not. They tweaked it to create an emotional conflict: pairing faces displaying particular emotional states with words written across them that either identified that state or not, such as “fear” displayed on a smiling face. While being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 19 subjects stared at 148 versions of these pairings, clicking a button to indicate whether that person was happy or afraid.

The researchers found that subjects were able to resolve conflicting images more quickly if they were preceded by other conflicting images, indicating that the brain was preparing itself for such conflict resolution. And the fMRI revealed that the emotional pictures did, in fact, activate the amygdala, but that when the face and word were discordant, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) also lit up and inhibited the activation of this emotion-controlling structure. "For example, if someone is walking on an empty street at night and hears a loud banging sound in the near distance, the amygdala would immediately light up," explains Joy Hirsch of Columbia University, senior author of the paper presenting the result in the September 21 issue of Neuron. "Once the source is determined, the rACC determines if action is needed or not. For example, if it was a car door slamming, the rACC would shut down the amygdala."

It is possible, however, that those roles are reversed: the amygdala habitually dampening the rACC and then letting it loose when emotional activity is reduced. But the rACC always seems to activate when assessing these stimuli, and tests of skin conductance on 10 different subjects exposed to the same test showed that the sympathetic nervous system was indeed less active when the rACC was inhibiting. The finding suggests a two-stage response to perceived threats as well as what might be malfunctioning in patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It may simply be that one of the executive portions of the brain is failing to calm its emotional colleague.
-David Biello

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Control of selfish behavior turned on, off

Selfish, egotistical behavior really is a turn-off, Swiss and U.S. researchers said, triggered by activating a region of the brain.

Researchers studied how activating the area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would trigger self-control, researchers from the University of Zurich and Harvard University said Friday in The (London) Telegraph. A weak magnetic field was used to disable this area during the experiment. Researchers said participants gave their permission before undergoing the experiment, the Telegraph said.

Study participants with the right DLPFC suppressed was less able to keep their self-control in check, the Telegraph said, but they still understood the concept of fairness.

Earlier studies had suggested self-control was dependent on the DLPFC, among the last areas of the brain to mature. The latest study, published Friday in "Science," noted this part of the brain is not fully developed in young people, the Telegraph said.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

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Shweta said:

...The quick version is, speaking as a researcher in some of this stuff, we don't know sh*t yet...

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Electronic chip, interacting with the brain, modifies pathways for controlling movement

Mechanism may have potential in stroke and brain injury rehabilitation

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study, to be published in the Nov. 2, 2006, edition of Nature, showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week. Strengthening of weak connections through this mechanism may have potential in the rehabilitation of patients with brain injuries, stroke, or paralysis.

The authors of study, titled "Long-Term Motor Cortex Plasticity Induced by an Electronic Neural Implant," were Dr. Andrew Jackson, senior research fellow in physiology and biophysics, Dr. Jaideep Mavoori, who recently earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the UW, and Dr. Eberhard Fetz, professor of physiology and biophysics. For many years Fetz and his colleagues have studied how the brains of monkeys control their limb muscles.

When awake, the brain continuously governs the body's voluntary movements. This is largely done through the activity of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the motor cortex. These nerve cells, or neurons, send signals down to the spinal cord to control the contraction of certain muscles, like those in the arms and legs.

The possibility that these neural signals can be recorded directly and used to operate a computer or to control mechanical devices outside of the body has been driving the rapidly expanding field of brain-computer interfaces, often abbreviated BCI. The recent Nature study suggests that the brain's nerve signals can be harnessed to create changes within itself.

The researchers tested a miniature, self-contained device with a tiny computer chip. The devices were placed on top of the heads of monkeys who were free to carry out their usual behaviors, including sleep. Called a Neurochip, the brain-computer interface was developed by Mavoori for his doctoral thesis.

"The Neurochip records the activity of motor cortex cells," Fetz explained, "It can convert this activity into a stimulus that can be sent back to the brain, spinal cord, or muscle, and thereby set up an artificial connection that operates continuously during normal behavior. This recurrent brain-computer interface creates an artificial motor pathway that the brain may learn to use to compensate for impaired pathways."

Jackson found that, when the brain-computer interface continuously connects neighboring sites in the motor cortex, it produces long-lasting changes. Namely, the movements evoked from the recording site changed to resemble those evoked from the stimulation site.

The researchers said that a likely explanation for these changes is the strengthening of pathways within the cortex from the recording to the stimulation site. This strengthening may have been produced by the continuous synchronization of activity at the two sites, generated by the recurrent brain-computer interface.

Timing is critical for creating these connections, the researchers said. The conditioning effect occurs only if the delay between the recorded activity and the stimulation is brief enough. The changes are produced in a day of continuous conditioning with the recurrent brain-computer interface, but last for many days after the circuit is turned off.

"This unusually long-lasting plasticity may be related to the fact that the conditioning is associated with normal behavior," Fetz said.

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Shweta said:

...So what if a chip could replace that part of the brain? *can* a chip be designed to replace mirror neurons, as opposed to normal motor neurons? It sounds like this chip is doing is Hebbian Learning, which is pretty limited, but if it can do that it could be extended to other learning algorithms...

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