Neuroscience
In OneZero. More on Medium.
A.I. researchers are turning to neuroscience to build smarter, more powerful neural networks
In 1998, an engineer in Sony’s computer science lab in Japan filmed a lost-looking robot moving trepidatiously around an enclosure. The robot was tasked with two objectives: avoid obstacles and find objects in the pen. It was able to do so because of its ability to learn the contours of the enclosure and the locations of the sought-after objects.
But whenever the robot encountered an obstacle it didn’t expect, something interesting happened: Its cognitive processes momentarily became chaotic. The robot was grappling with new, unexpected data that didn’t match its predictions about the enclosure. The researchers who set up the…
Neuroscience in the courtroom could jeopardize our privacy and civil rights
In 2010, an escaped convict named John McCluskey killed an older couple while stealing their camping trailer. Despite the horrific nature of the crime, the jury rejected a death penalty sentence based on a brain scan that revealed damage to McCluskey’s frontal lobe. Jurors believed this damage made him less culpable for the crime. In a way, they believed that his brain made him do it.
The field of neuroscience has attracted the attention of legal practitioners for decades. …
Science has come a long way since I first held a brain in my hand
When you hold a human brain in your hands, it doesn’t feel how you’d expect.
Most people think of something soft and mushy, like a stress ball or a Jell-O mold. But pulled from a jar of formaldehyde, the brain is much denser and less yielding — it’s like holding a wad of suet.
For cognitive science (neuroscience) majors at Johns Hopkins University in the early 2000s, Brain Day was a right of passage. …
An interview with the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of ‘How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… For Now’
Algorithms have thrown the gauntlet down. They’re challenging our distinctive status as the most advanced learning species on the planet. In the past several years, machines have “learned” to instantaneously transcribe a foreign language and detect typos in our Google Docs; they’ve predicted the superfecta of the Kentucky Derby, provided well-wrought medical advice, composed classical music albums, and humbled us at chess. And yet, according to the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, the most sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies are still far less smart than the learning capabilities contained in even an infant’s brain.
While the iPhone’s voice-controlled assistant Siri can recognize…
Unconscious monkeys zapped in one area of the brain suddenly woke up
Last year, a woman from the United Arab Emirates woke up in a German hospital after a road accident in 1991 left her in a coma for 27 years. Her doctors couldn’t believe it.
Her case was exceedingly rare. Only a handful of other patients have ever recovered after that long. Some people may gradually come out of a coma or wake up after a few weeks. Some become what’s known as “minimally conscious,” showing occasional awareness and responsiveness. Others may enter a vegetative state — where they seem awake but show no signs of awareness. …
Deep brain stimulation could help curb drug and alcohol addiction
For years, Frank Plummer was dependent on alcohol, drinking 20 ounces of scotch a day. An infectious disease scientist who worked in Kenya at the height of the HIV epidemic, Plummer turned to alcohol in the 1980s to deal with the stress of his job, and also the grief that came with witnessing the devastation of AIDS firsthand.
Plummer drank to celebrate and relax, too. Alcohol controlled his life, but he didn’t realize that until 2012, when his liver began to fail. Even when he got a liver transplant in 2014, he soon started drinking heavily again. He tried Alcoholics…
The so-called organoids could shed light on how autism and schizophrenia develop
Studying how the human brain develops is difficult. Brain tissue can’t be removed from living people, and although it can be examined after someone dies, dead organs are not ideal for studying the mechanisms that give rise to brain disorders. Animal brains can only tell scientists so much, and human fetal tissue is hard to come by.
As an alternative to real brain tissue, researchers have recently figured out how to turn stem cells into neurons and grow them until they form tiny, three-dimensional blobs of brain tissue no bigger than a pea. Now, these aren’t actual human brains, of…
Infection with Toxoplasma gondii has unexpectedly protective effects in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease
If you live in the United States, there’s a decent chance you carry the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii. (Over 40 million Americans do.) You might know this protozoan as “Toxo” or the “crazy cat person” parasite, uncomfortably named for its potential connection to schizophrenia development and because of the completely unsupported idea that infection makes people love cats. Infection can be deadly for a very small subset of people, but Toxo’s unique ability to coexist with healthy hosts is shifting the way some scientists view parasitic infection.
While some are focused on fighting these invaders, others think we might have…
If we expect the right to free political thought, and want to prevent corporations from controlling our minds, we need a robust A.I. policy framework now
Co-authored by Susan Schneider
It’s 2045. You stroll into the Center for Mind Design. There you can purchase a brain chip to augment your intelligence or a bundle of several such chips. People wishing for savant-like mathematical abilities can purchase the “Human Calculator” chip while those in the market for supreme serenity now can buy “Zen Garden.” And that’s just the beginning. Enhanced attention, virtuoso musical abilities, telepathy to directly experience other augmented people’s thoughts, and so much more are all there for the choosing. Which would you pick?
If you’re unsure, how about mulling it over with a philosopher…
A brain implant helped restore his sight after a tragic car crash
In December 2011, a horrific car accident knocked Jason Esterhuizen unconscious. When he woke up in a hospital in Pretoria, South Africa, hours away from his hometown, he couldn’t see. The crash had destroyed his eyes and left him completely blind.
Esterhuizen was devastated. At the time, he was 23 and studying to become an airline pilot. The first two years after the accident were the hardest. “Life changes in an instant,” he tells OneZero. “I used to fly airplanes and ride motorcycles and drive my own car.”
Esterhuizen eventually got mobility training and learned how to read braille, use…
