Training the brain to improve on new tasks

A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills — from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph.

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Samsung tests Brain Computer Interfacing

Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world, MIT Technology Review reports. In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.In their demonstration, the researchers found that people could launch an application and make selections within it by concentrating on an icon that was blinking at a distinctive frequency.

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Injectable Optoelectronics for Brain Control

Photo: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and
Washington University-St. Louis

A flexible system that includes electrodes, LEDs, photodetectors, and a temperature sensor were designed to be implanted in an animal’s brain and wirelessly controlled via an RF receiver affixed to the animal’s skull.

Optogenetics, a recently developed technique that uses light to map and control brain activity, requires the genetic modification of an animal’s brain cells and the insertion of optical fibers and electrical wire into its brain. The bulky wires and fibers emerge from the skull, hampering the animal’s movement and making it difficult to perform certain experiments that could lead to breakthroughs for Parkinson’s disease, addiction, depression, and spinal cord injuries.

But now, a new ultrathin, flexible device laden with light-emitting diodes and sensors, both the size of individual brain cells, promises to make optogenetics completely wireless. The 20-micrometer-thick device can be safely injected deep into the brain and controlled and powered using radio-frequency signals. Its developers say the technology could also be used in other parts of the body, with broad implications for medical diagnosis and therapy.

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Easing brain fatigue with a walk in the park

Scientists have known for some time that the human brain’s ability to stay calm and focused is limited and can be overwhelmed by the constant noise and hectic, jangling demands of city living, sometimes resulting in a condition informally known as brain fatigue.


Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh attached new, portable EEG electrodes to the scalps of 12 healthy young adults, connected to a laptops carried in a backpack for each volunteer, then sent each volunteer out on a short walk of about a mile and half that wound through three different sections of Edinburgh: a historic shopping district, a busy commercial district, and a park-like setting. What they found confirmed the idea that green spaces lessen brain fatigue.

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Whole brain cellular-level activity mapping once a second

Neuroscientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute have mapped the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution, with signficant implications for neuroscience research and projects like the proposed Brain Activity Map (BAM).

This represents the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior, as Nature Methods methagora blog noted.

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Brain-to-Brain Interface for Rats

Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats, enabling the animals to communicate directly via implanted microelectrode arrays to solve simple behavioral problems, according to a study published today (February 28) in Scientific Reports.

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Enable always continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat

If you are reading pdf files, you may have noticed the two different page display modes: single page display and continuous page display. In single page display, when you reach end of page, it automatically jumps to the next page. If you are like me, will feel this is disorienting at best. Even if you set default page display to continuous, at Preferences > Page Display > Default Page Layout, you will notice that not all pdf files will follow this and you will end up, manually changing the mode each time, resulting in diminishing respect for Acrobat. After exhaustive search (well mostly ) I have finally discovered an override setting.

To always enable continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat, go to:
Preferences > Accessibility  and check "Always use Page Layout Style" as "Single Page Continuous".
And enjoy your mind bending control over the pdf files...

Paralysed woman's thoughts control robotic arm

A new advanced control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralysed woman's thoughts. Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm. Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal.

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Brain Implant Improves Thinking

Scientists have designed a brain implant that sharpened decision making and restored lost mental capacity in monkeys, providing the first demonstration in primates of the sort of brain prosthesis that could eventually help people with damage from dementia, strokes or other brain injuries.

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Scientists read dreams

Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dream.  Researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. The researchers extracted key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories that appeared most frequently in their dream reports.

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