Mind Reading Computer Could Communicate with Coma Patients

Canadian researchers have developing a mind-reading computer that could help communicate with people in a coma. 

The University of Western Ontario researchers used neuroimaging to read human thoughts via brain activity when they are conveying specific ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. The team say their research could lead to dramatic new ways of attempting to communicate with patients in a vegetative state.
 
In the study, participants were asked to concentrate on a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response to questions like 'Are you married?' or 'Do you have brothers and sisters?' and only think their response, not speak it. By analyzing their brain activity, the team were able to accurately read their answers to a series of questions.

Their findings were published in The Journal of Neuroscience in a study titled, The Brain's Silent Messenger: Using Selective Attention to Decode Human Thought for Brain-Based Communication.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2333861/Mind-reading-communicate-people-coma-Researchers-say-understand-answers-simple-questions-using-brain-scans.html#ixzz2VC7XUvkQ
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Why We Love Beautiful Things

This article from the New York Times alludes to the type pf work we do here at SyncSense. That is, there are some stimuli that impacts the brain in a very viseral, psychological manner that can make us more attuned to messages, more engaged in content and  more apt to take action on messaging. 

The full article can be accessed here. The following is an excerpt:

GREAT design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.

Yet, while we are drawn to good design, as Mr. Hamel points out, we’re not quite sure why.

This is starting to change. A revolution in the science of design is already under way, and most people, including designers, aren’t even aware of it.

Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment.

This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace. In studies of call centers, for example, workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 percent more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.

In some cases the same effect can happen with a photographic or even painted mural, whether or not it looks like an actual view of the outdoors. Corporations invest heavily to understand what incentivizes employees, and it turns out that a little color and a mural could do the trick.

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.

We respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent — just by being in our field of vision. One researcher has calculated that since Americans spend $300 billion a year dealing with stress-related illness, the economic benefits of these shapes, widely applied, could be in the billions.

What Our Brains Can Tell Us

This recent article from the New York Times helps give insight into they type of neuroscience we practice here at SyncSense. The connection of neurons and how they are connected is the basis to creating more effective videos that optimize viewer connection, awareness and engagement. Read on...

AFTER President Obama’s recent announcement of a plan to invigorate the study of neuroscience with what could amount to a $3 billion investment, a reasonable taxpayer might ask: Why brain science? Why now? 

Here’s why. Imagine you were an alien catching sight of the Earth. Your species knows nothing about humans, let alone how to interpret the interactions of seven billion people in complex social networks. With no acquaintance with the nuances of human language or behavior, it proves impossible to decipher the secret idiom of neighborhoods and governments, the interplay of local and global culture, or the intertwining economies of nations. It just looks like pandemonium, a meaningless Babel. 

So it goes with the brain. We are the aliens in that landscape, and the brain is an even more complicated cipher. It is composed of 100 billion electrically active cells called neurons, each connected to many thousands of its neighbors. Each neuron relays information in the form of miniature voltage spikes, which are then converted into chemical signals that bridge the gap to other neurons. Most neurons send these signals many times per second; if each signaling event were to make a sound as loud as a pin dropping, the cacophony from a single human head would blow out all the windows. The complexity of such a system bankrupts our language; observing the brain with our current technologies, we mostly detect an enigmatic uproar. 

Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously. 

That’s a tall order, but it’s worth it, because this is an exceptionally personal mystery to crack. Our thoughts, desires, agonies and ecstasies all emerge from the details of the neural landscape.

Just as an alien studying the planet could catalog several large-scale calamities — disease epidemics, volcanic eruptions, political-feedback loops that lead to war — so can we observe disasters transpiring in the dense communities of our brain cells. We give them names like neurodegeneration, stroke and epilepsy. But just because we can name them doesn’t mean we know how to fix them. For example, we have little idea how to mend the damage from the widespread destruction of a traumatic brain injury (the signature injury of America’s wars). The same goes for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, and for brain tumors, autism, dementia, paralysis and so on. 

While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems, we have yet to understand how to remedy them. Learning to better speak the language of the brain is our best hope for turning the chaos into order, for unmasking and addressing the hidden patterns behind disease. 

But deciphering the neural code is not only about physical health. Consider the implications for societal health. A deeper understanding of mental illness will improve early detection, resources and rehabilitation, potentially helping us find a way to stop using our prisons as a de facto mental health care system. Similarly, we can leverage brain science for a more cost-effective approach to drug crime. We cannot win the war on drugs simply by attacking supply; we must focus on demand. And that requires decoding the circuitry and pharmacology in the brain of the addict. 

Beyond social policy, a better understanding of the brain will steer the future of our technologies. Smart people have been beating at the door of artificial intelligence for decades with only limited success. Google Translate can convert any language to any other, but understands nothing of the content. Watson still can’t answer simple questions like, “When President Obama walks into a room, does his nose come with him?” Our most promising hope for creating artificial intelligence is figuring out how natural intelligence works. 

It can also usher in an era of bio-inspired machinery. You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your smartphone and expect the phone to function. But when a young child with severe epilepsy has half of her brain surgically removed, she tends to do just fine: the remaining brain tissue automatically rewires itself to take over responsibility for the parts that are missing. Similarly, when an animal breaks a leg, its brain adapts the gait of the remaining legs so the animal can keep moving.

We don’t know how to build self-configuring machines like these. When a Mars rover loses a wheel, our investment ends: it becomes another piece of immovable space junk. Imagine a future in which we capitalize on the principles of neural reconfiguration, producing devices — from smartphones to cars to space stations — that flexibly adapt rather than bust. For now, the brain is the only functioning example of such futuristic machinery on our planet. 

Brain health, drug rehabilitation, computer intelligence, adaptive devices — these economic drivers would lavishly pay back any investment in brain research. So when a taxpayer asks how to endow our country with a confident future, you can reply, the answer is right in back of your eyes.

David Eagleman, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, is the author of “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 23, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: What Our Brains Can Teach Us.

Neuromyths

This article on neuromyths  was published on Reveries.com . It outlines three commonly held neuromyths that are actually false.



1. "The idea that we use only ten percent of our brain is patently false," report Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Wall Street Journal. If you thought it was true, don't feel bad, because so do about two-thirds of the American public. Apparently the myth is perpetuated by neuroimaging research "showing only a small number of areas 'lighting up' in a brain scan, but those are just areas that have more than a base line level of activity; the dark regions aren't dormant or unused."

2. Another popular neuromyth is that "enriching children's environments will strengthen their brains." This myth "may have emerged from evidence that rats raised in cages with amenities like exercise wheels, tunnels and other rats showed better cognitive abilities and improvements in brain structure compared with rats that grew up isolated in bare cages." All that means is that a "truly impoverished and unnatural environment leads to poorer development." It doesn't mean that "constant exposure to 'Baby Einstein'-type videos ... will boost cognitive development."

3. A third neuromyth is that "students perform better when lessons are delivered in their preferred learning style." One study found that 94 percent of teachers believe this to be true, but according to a study by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, it is false. He's done studies that show that visual presentation leads to better memory than does verbal, but there is "no relationship between a learner's preferences and the instruction style." Another study found that many people "believe that memory works like a video recording or that they can tell when someone is staring at the back of their head." 

Thank you to Tim Manners, the editor of Cool News.

SyncSense at CTAM Insights 2012

SyncSense is a proud sponsor of the 2012 CTAM Insights conference, an excerpt of which is in this article from Charlene Weisler's WeislerMedia blog.

Right and Left Side of the Boomer Brain

This recent article in Mediapost.com on brain hemispheres and what attracts Boomers might be of interest to you.

The article talks about the right and left sides of the brain and how each side processes information differently. This impacts how marketers should present their messages to consumers - in this articles, case, to Boomers.

What can understanding how the brain functions help online and traditional marketers? The answer is plenty. For example, since the left brain is resistant to new information regardless of how brilliantly it is presented, the left brain will generally not process new information coming into the brain unless it has first been processed by the right brain. The right brain pays attention to stories but not lectures. Stories should be word pictures because the right brain’s command of verbal language is somewhat primitive.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/184147/go-with-the-grain-of-the-brain.html#ixzz29ap8vOfr

We at Syncsense realize that the way the brain receives and processes messages can impact how these messages are  interpreted, accepted (or not) and acted upon (or not). Our patent pending guidelines can help media companies prepare their content in a way that can optimize its value to the viewer.

This is Your Brain on Jane Austen

Susan Celia Greenfield, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University and Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, does research on Jane Austen. 

In a recent study of readers of Austen, it appears as if Austen is making news in the field of neuroscience. 

Here is an excerpt of a recent Greenfield blog post:
The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging (CNi) has been tracking the blood flow patterns in the brains of Austen readers. How? By having literature graduate students read the second chapter of Mansfield Park while getting brain images using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The subjects were asked to alternate styles, reading some passages for pleasure and others with the kind of close critical attention required in literature courses like my own. The preliminary results surprised the researchers. Not only does close reading create a distinctly different blood flow pattern in the brain, but it also activates diverse regions that stretch far beyond those associated with attention, in one example, even reaching into areas generally dedicated to physical activity. You may think you are sitting still with a book. Your brain does not.

As it happens, Austen has a particularly effective technique for representing a character's consciousness (or for creating the fiction that such a thing exists). Known as free indirect discourse, or FID, the technique allows the narrator to enter a character's mind and adopt the language of her thoughts while retaining the objectivity of a third-person point of view. It is like a special lens that can simultaneously zoom inside consciousness and zoom out and see it from a distance. An MRI machine records activation in parts of the brain the subject isn't even aware of. FID represents aspects of a character's thoughts that the character herself does not know.

Such immersion in a character is one version of what Natalie Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, and a co-director of the neuroscience study, describes as reading for pleasure. When she and her colleagues were first designing their experiment, they ran a pilot that put literature professors in the MRI. As Natalie explained to Laura Miller from Salon, "One thing we realized immediately... is that professors are terrible subjects!" On the phone with me she added, "We don't know how to read for pleasure anymore."

"And we definitely do not know how to do it in an MRI scanner!"