Positive Technology Journal

Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network.

Nature. 2010 Jan 20;

Authors: Doeller CF, Barry C, Burgess N

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of freely moving rats provide a strikingly periodic representation of self-location which is indicative of very specific computational mechanisms. However, the existence of grid cells in humans and their distribution throughout the brain are unknown. Here we show that the preferred firing directions of directionally modulated grid cells in rat entorhinal cortex are aligned with the grids, and that the spatial organization of grid-cell firing is more strongly apparent at faster than slower running speeds. Because the grids are also aligned with each other, we predicted a macroscopic signal visible to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. We then looked for this signal as participants explored a virtual reality environment, mimicking the rats' foraging task: fMRI activation and adaptation showing a speed-modulated six-fold rotational symmetry in running direction. The signal was found in a network of entorhinal/subicular, posterior and medial parietal, lateral temporal and medial prefrontal areas. The effect was strongest in right entorhinal cortex, and the coherence of the directional signal across entorhinal cortex correlated with spatial memory performance. Our study illustrates the potential power of combining single-unit electrophysiology with fMRI in systems neuroscience. Our results provide evidence for grid-cell-like representations in humans, and implicate a specific type of neural representation in a network of regions which supports spatial cognition and also autobiographical memory.

Via Mauro Cherubini's blog

I have created a new group on Science 2.0 on Linkedin. The goal of the community is to connect researchers, consultants and companies and institutions interested in the impact of social media and web 2.0 tools on science and technology.

The community is growing beyond my expectations, with more than 50 professionals and researchers subscribed. I see it as a great opportunity to share news, opinions and tools in this exciting field.

If you are interested and already subscribed to Linkedin, you can join this group here

Via Medgadget

The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

My friend and science journalist Pierangelo Garzia has written an interesting piece on the neuroscientific basis of collecting that will appear soon in the Cartier Art Magazine, "Collectors".

Here is the abstract:

Recent studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that collecting is a biological necessity even more than a psychological one. For early man collecting was a means of providing for his vital needs. For contemporary man is an important way of providing for psychological well-being.

Prehistoric man set aside the fundamental elements he needed for his survival and so do we. The refrigerator and the supermarket are the modern equivalents of cold cellars and food caches of earlier times.

Collecting is born of a basic need: survival, not only physical, but psychical well. There's not a great deal of difference between prehistoric man and urbanized third millennium beings like ourselves.

 

Cartier 19, 2008, Cartier Art Magazine, "Collectors" (monographic issue).

Researchers from Siemens have developed a prototype MRI scanner that uses a lattice of small coils positioned around the head rather than large coils you lie inside. As noted in this Technology Review article, the device is likely to have important applications in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a variation of standard MRI that tracks blood flow in the brain as an indirect measure of activity.

The technique is often used to locate the parts of the brain that control specific functions, such as speech and movement. The first clinical application for the device will likely be fMRI for neurosurgery planning, says [Siemens MR vice president] Bundy. "Surgeons want to know where speech and motor areas are when they take a tumor out- the more precise, the better."

Via Neurobot 

Ulysses Bernardet from the Institute of Neuroinformatics University ETH Zurich has developed IQR, an efficient graphical environment to design large-scale multi-level neuronal systems that can control real-world devices - robots in the broader sense - in real-time.

IQR has been released as open-source under GNU General Public License (GPL)

Via kurzweilAI.net

Researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity - in this case, adding versus subtracting. 

Read the full story 

From Medgadget

According to researchers at University of Rochester, video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision:

Via NeuroGuy 

Researchers are making progresses in predicting the intention of subjects with reasonable accuracy:

That quote is from a press release from the Max Planck Institute, Revealing secret intentions in the brain

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, has an article in Time magazine about the current state of understanding of consciousness.

From the article:

Neglect and prism adaptation: a new therapeutic tool for spatial cognition disorders.

Restor Neurol Neurosci. 2006;24(4-6):347-56

Authors: Rode G, Klos T, Courtois-Jacquin S, Rossetti Y, Pisella L

PURPOSE: A large proportion of right-hemisphere stroke patients show unilateral neglect, a neurological deficit of perception, attention, representation, and/or performing actions within their left-sided space, inducing many functional debilitating effects on everyday life, and responsible for poor functional recovery and ability to benefit from treatment. This spatial cognition disorder affects the orientation of behaviour with a shift of proprioceptive representations toward the lesion side. METHODS: This shift can be reduced after a prism adaptation period to a right lateral displacement of visual field (induced by a simple target-pointing task with base-left wedge prisms). The modification of visuo-motor or sensory-motor correspondences induced by prism adaptation involves improvement of different symptoms of neglect. RESULTS: Classical visuo-motor tests could be improved for at least 2h after adaptation, but also non-motor and non-visual tasks. In addition, cross-modal effects have been described (tactile extinction and dichotic listening), mental imagery tasks (geographic map, number bisection) and even visuo-constructive disorders. These cognitive effects are shown to result from indirect bottom-up effects of the deeper, adaptive realignment component of the reaction to prisms. Lesion studies and functional imaging data evoke a cerebello-cortical network in which each structure plays a specific role and not all structures are crucial for adaptation ability. CONCLUSIONS: These cognitive effects of prism adaptation suggest that prism adaptation does not act specifically on the ipsilesional bias characteristic of unilateral neglect but rehabilitates more generally the visuo-spatial functions attributed to the right cortical hemisphere. These results reinforce the idea that the process of prism adaptation may activate brain functions related to multisensory integration and higher spatial representations and show a generalization at a functional level. Prism adaptation therefore appears as a new powerful therapeutic tool for spatial cognition disorders.

Via the Neuronerd 

Diigo is a social annotation service that turns the web writable allowing users to privately or publicly annotate any website they visit, thereby making a “participatory and interactive media” for its users. When you highlight a word on any page a drop down menu automatically appears (see image below) that lets you:

• search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines
• search for highlighted terms in four social bookmarking systems
• do a blog search for highlighted terms
• search for your terms in the entire site you are on (Google, Yahoo, Ask site: search)
• search for inbound links to the URL you are on in four different search engines (including Technorati and Google)
• search for your highlighted terms in seven different verticals from local to TV to stocks.

Via Medgadget

PLoS ONE - the newest journal of the Public Library of Science - is looking to completely shift the way peer-reviewed literature works:

Scope:

PLoS ONE features reports of primary research from all disciplines within science and medicine. By not excluding papers on the basis of subject area, PLoS ONE facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers whether within or between disciplines.

Peer Review:

Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.

Open Access:

All works published in PLoS journals are open access, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Everything is immediately available online without cost to anyone, anywhere--to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use--subject only to the condition that the original authorship is properly attributed. Copyright is retained by the author.

 

Read more

via Langreiter

a commentary at the Journal of Neuroscience speculates on the future of research journals and peer-review:

Research studies appear on databases, not in journals

First, I don't think that it makes any sense to continue with paper copies of research articles. Instead of the "quasi-legal" document that is the current scientific article, we should be moving to full data being available on the web together with the software that might have been used to manipulate the data, as well as multimedia presentations to back up the data. Research papers are primarily of interest to other researchers in the same area, and they usually don't need the introduction and certainly not the discussion, which mostly degenerates to hype anyway
...
If an absence of peer review (or post-publication review, as I call it) is a step too far, then we should have an author (or rather funder) pays model. These fees could support a peer review mechanism, which should be open in that both authors and readers would know who was reviewing studies. It's ethically unacceptable that such important judgements should be made an unidentified judge. Like it or not, we live in a world where what is not transparent is deemed to be biased, corrupt, or incompetent until proved otherwise. Plus I believe that peer review should be a scientific discourse rather than an arbitrary judgment. This is far from radical: it's simply science returning to its roots when science was presented and discussed at meetings rather than published in journals.

Perhaps we will invent new forms of peer review by learning from innovations like Wikipedia. It is in some ways a form of peer review, only reviewers make changes directly rather than simply commenting.
...
Another worry from the conservative about such a system is to wonder how credit would be allocated. At present credit comes from publishing in prestigious journals. Often the impact factor of the journal (a dubious and manipulated statistic) is allocated to the paper, which is wholly unscientific because there is little correlation between the citations to studies and the impact factor of the journals in which they are published, because the impact factor of a journal is driven by a small number of highly cited studies (Seglen, 1997). In the new world I'm imagining, credit would come from the buzz from researchers and hits on the study. These hits can be disclosed in real time, unlike citations, which come years after studies are published.

Via Medgadget

Researchers from Brunel University in the UK have developed a PDA-based pain recording and monitoring system:

Brunel University today unveils the World's first computer based, three-dimensional (3D) solution for pain visualisation. The tool will help patients record their own pain, as well as providing practitioners with a way to collect information on patient experience of pain and allows greater insight into the way pain travels around the body...

The innovative pain visualisation tool is displayed via a web browser as a 3D body. Users can log pain data on an easy-to-use PDA monitor at regular intervals. Pain can be classified as: burning, aching, stabbing, pins and needles and numbness with each pain type allocated a colour, which is represented on the 3D rotating tool.

The data is collected and the pain entries can be stored and replayed over an extended period as a rotating multimedia image, providing physicians with more detailed understanding of surface pain journeys.

Brunel University today unveils the World's first computer based, three-dimensional (3D) solution for pain visualisation. The tool will help patients record their own pain, as well as providing practitioners with a way to collect information on patient experience of pain and allows greater insight into the way pain travels around the body...

The innovative pain visualisation tool is displayed via a web browser as a 3D body. Users can log pain data on an easy-to-use PDA monitor at regular intervals. Pain can be classified as: burning, aching, stabbing, pins and needles and numbness with each pain type allocated a colour, which is represented on the 3D rotating tool.

The data is collected and the pain entries can be stored and replayed over an extended period as a rotating multimedia image, providing physicians with more detailed understanding of surface pain journeys.

 

Link

Via Mind Hacks

Synesthete.org is a website where you can test yourself for synaesthesia - the condition where senses are crossed so, for example, you might be able to taste shapes or see colours associated with specific numbers. The site is run by the Eagleman Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Via Frontal Cortex

The New York Times reports that British scientists have built an apparatus that simulates human digestion.

From the article:

Constructed from sophisticated plastics and metals able to withstand the corrosive acids and enzymes found in the human gut, the device may ultimately help in the development of super-nutrients, such as obesity-fighting foods that could fool the stomach into thinking it is full.

''There have been lots of jam-jar models of digestion before,'' said Dr. Martin Wickham of Norwich's Institute of Food Research, the artificial gut's chief designer, referring to the beakers of enzymes typically used to approximate the chemical reactions in the stomach.

Wickham's patented artificial gut is a two-part model that is slightly larger than a desktop computer. The top half consists of a funnel in which food, stomach acids and digestive enzymes are mixed. Once this hydration process is finished, the food gets ground down in a silver metal tube encased in a dark, transparent box.

Software sets the parameters of the artificial gut - how long food remains in a particular part of the stomach, predicted hormone responses at various stages, and whether it is an infant or adult gut.

(...)

With a capacity about half the size of an actual stomach, the artificial gut can ''eat'' roughly 24 ounces of food. To date, the most substantial meal it's enjoyed is vegetable soup.

''It's so realistic that it can even vomit,'' adds Wickham.

 

Read the full story here