http://www.livescience.com/culture/080811-brain-evolution.html

The conjecture goes like this: because we learned to cook our food, humans were able to get more and better calories than our raw food eating cousins thus spurring a leap of cognitive ability.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Makes intuitive sense.

There are two primary ancient elixirs of the ancients the elixir of life and an authentic aphrodisiac.  We have seen the creation of an authentic aphrodisiac in niagra are we on the verge of seeing the other?

Alzeimers has been apparently a cured.

The trial was a Phase 2 study, which checks the safety and efficacy of the drug, but if a large-scale Phase 3 trial due next year repeats the findings, the drug could be available for prescribing by 2012.

This is remarkable.

Patients with the brain disorder had no significant decline in their mental function over a 19-month period.

Very comprehensive review of the capabilities of this Neural Impulse Actuator device.

Review :: OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator

Reading through the review it appears that a lot of the control comes from the headband interpreting facial muscle movements.  There appears to be more bio-feedback type of signal receptors on the device but the reviewers struggled to make that portion work.

The review will be updated over the next month as they have handed the N.I.A. off to one of their testers to get fully immersed in the use of the headband.

the nia has now been passed over to our Gaming/Software reviewer - Chris Buer for a full month of testing with weekly updates. These updates will be posted as additional pages in this review, so be sure to check back on a weekly basis or register over on our forums for an automatic update on when new content is added to the review.

I'll check back later.

Here's the homepage of OCZ: OCZtechnology.com

And a brief description of what the device tracks from the site:

The biopotentials include electro-myogram, electro-encephalogram and electro-oculogram, that is, electrical signals that are generated by activity patterns in muscles, brain, and eyes, respectively.

We did this in a marketing class for my MBA last fall.  It is pretty neat.  I can tell you that you will fail and you can do nothing about it.  We'll talk about it in the comments.

Mind-Reading Game Headset to Hit Market

Brain computer interface is coming.  And it's coming fast.  There are several companies set to hit the market with products over the next couple of years: Emotiv and NeuroSky.

Both of these products are focusing on the gaming market segment to begin with.  There they have a ready customer, willing to spend money on accessories, looking for new gadgets and typically younger, typically male.

If done correctly the experience gained from entering that market could lay the groundwork for many other segments: quadraplegics, fighter pilots, surgeons, artists, equipment operators, data/security experts. 

Eventually how about an everyday person in a wired world...

Paralyzed man's mind is 'read'

Eric Ramsay can only "speak" by moving his eyes.  Now scientists and doctors are on the verge of being able to interpret his brain signals as speach...

"We have been moving towards decoding primitive vocabulary for a while now. But this is certainly an interesting development, although invasive techniques, where something is out in someone's brain, such as these will of course carry risks."

This is remarkable.

The forefront of Brain Computer Interface.  This is not a completed interface but the doctors and scientists involved believe they are getting close.

This segues nicely from the post I wrote yesterday: Will Wetware result in Telepathy?.

CNet News: [linky]

This is not necessarily a new invention but more of an INDUSTRY STANDARD.  This will hopefully allow for faster research in specific areas of brain computer interface.  Other researchers can focus on solving specific problems, they can use the MIT standard interface algorithm for the communication layer.

Fascinating.

MIT press release: [linky]

 Key point:

Until now, researchers working on brain prosthetics have used different algorithms depending on what method they were using to measure brain activity. The new model is applicable no matter what measurement technique is used, according to Srinivasan. "We don't need to reinvent a new paradigm for each modality or brain region," he said.

Journal of Neurophysiology, the research is due to be published in October: [linky]

techRivet.com has been trying to stay on top of the whole Brain Computer Interface [BCI] technologies for awhile now. [here] We've even talked about NeuroSky themselves and their almost-ready-for-consumer BCI unit.

Now we can see it in action

The games look somewhat basic at the moment, but give it time. If it is anything like the Wii controller and how fast people are adapting and mod-ing its uses...well it might be an interesting phase of computer interface development coming up.

Can we understand how the brain works?

What is our intuitive underlying assumption about brain that is incorrect? 

Take a watch and find out.

This is fascinating. Using the tongue as the interface with the brain for Brain Computer Interface (BCI). Cool idea.

Lotsa nerve endings, very sensitive, can discern pixels up to 64k...with some training this could be very interesting. And if they can work with the taste buds you could flavor colors...

a growing body of research indicates that the tongue may in fact be the second-best place on the body for receiving visual information from the world and transmitting it to the brain.

[linky]

So.  Some stroke victims that have experienced paralysis on one side of their body experience something called "anosognosia".  They believe that the paralyzed limb attached to their body does not belong to them.

In fact, fibers in the motor cortex on the right side of her brain, which controls movement on her left side, have been irreparably damaged by the stroke, and she will never use her left arm again. But Mrs. M. is not a stubborn old woman refusing to admit a difficult truth. A few minutes later Mrs. M. looks at her left hand, resting inertly in her lap.

Doctor, she asks, whose hand is this?

Whose hand do you think it is?

Well, it certainly isn’t mine!

Then whose is it?

It is my son’s hand, Doctor.

They honestly, completely, consciously deny the fact that the paralyzed limb belongs to them. 

This article is fascinating if a bit long: The Brain That Misplaced Its Body

Should we design our AI to be weird too?

A tangential discussion can be raised around the attempt to create "hard" AI.  There a lot of people that think we are on the verge of creating AI.  I know, I know it's been talked about for decades but you must admit, there is compelling facts of computer speed and memory size that are providing some merit behind the discussion.

Well what if one of the key features of our intelligence is the plain weirdness of the architecture and structure of the human brain.  What if all the randomness and madness is a necessary "razors edge" that's needed to achieve consciousness and intelligence?

Can we architecture weirdness into a design?  Can logical computer scientists plan for all this fuzzy logic?

Can they make an AI doubt the existence of its limbs?

Give yourself some time to read this or even print it off.  It's a philosophical thought exercise made modern and "plausible" (ok maybe not).

Where Am I?

What if your brain could be removed safely and radio circuitry of some complexity implanted as the conduit with your body?  Where are "you"? Are you where your senses are? or where your consciousness is?

I decided that good old Yorick deserved a visit. I and my new body, whom we might as well call Fortinbras, strode into the familiar lab to another round of applause from the technicians, who were of course congratulating themselves, not me. Once more I stood before the vat and contemplated poor Yorick, and on a whim I once again cavalierly flicked off the output transmitter switch. Imagine my surprise when nothing unusual happened. No fainting spell, no nausea, no noticeable change. A technician hurried to restore the switch to ON, but still I felt nothing.

I demanded an explanation, which the project director hastened to provide. It seems that before they had even operated on the first occasion, they had constructed a computer duplicate of my brain, reproducing both the complete information-processing structure and the computational speed of my brain in a giant computer program. After the operation, but before they had dared to send me off on my mission to Oklahoma, they had run this computer system and Yorick side by side. The incoming signals from Hamlet were sent simultaneously to Yorick's transceivers and to the computer's array of inputs. And the outputs from Yorick were not only beamed back to Hamlet, my body; they were recorded and checked against the simultaneous output of the computer program, which was called “Hubert” for reasons obscure to me. Over days and even weeks, the outputs were identical and synchronous, which of course did not prove that they had succeeded in copying the brain's functional structure, but the empirical support was greatly encouraging.

A fun read.