Tag: Brain-Computer Interfaces

Most animals have a keen sense of smell, which assists them in everyday tasks. Now, a new study led by researchers at NYU School of Medicine sheds light on exactly how animals follow smells. Published online in the journal eLife on Aug. 21, the study measured the behavior of fruit flies as they navigated through

A deadly feature of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is its invasion of the central nervous system. ALL in the central nervous system is very difficult to treat, because most drugs are blocked from the organ system due to a “blood-brain barrier” designed to protect the brain. How cancer cells enter the central nervous system has

The behavior of people who remain committed to a choice, even when it is clear that an alternate choice would be a better option, has been a perplexing phenomenon to psychologists and economists. For example, people will continue to wait in the slow line at a grocery store, stick out an unhealthy relationship, or refuse

Being aware of our surroundings is a fundamental aspect of our existence. But what in our biological makeup determines how we access and interpret the endless stream of information around us? A new Tel Aviv University study published in Current Biology suggests that noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter responsible for arousal in the brain, plays a vital

Our eye hosts a powerful biological computer, the retina. Understanding how the retina transforms images from the outside world into signals that the brain can interpret would not only result in insights into brain computations, but could also be useful for medicine. As machine learning and artificial intelligence develop, eye diseases will soon be described

Anxious people take fewer risks — this is not surprising. However, a team of psychologists from the German Friedrich Schiller University Jena, together with partners from Würzburg in Germany and the Canadian University of Victoria have succeeded in making this decision process visible in the brain, allowing them to predict the behaviour of individuals. They

Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is a look of surprise on a person’s face, dogs tend to turn their head to

Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: usually scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language. But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Psychedelic drugs may have mind-altering powers in the physical sense, too. A new study, published June 12 in the journal Cell Reports, found psychedelics, specifically DOI, DMT, and LSD, can change brain cells in rats and flies, making neurons more likely to branch out and connect with one another. The work supports the theory that

The coordination of neural activity across widespread brain networks is essential for human cognition. Researchers have long assumed that oscillations in the brain, commonly measured for research purposes, brain-computer interfacing, and clinical tests, were stationary signals that occurred independently at separate brain regions. Biomedical engineers at Columbia Engineering have discovered a new fundamental feature of

In a study investigating the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for drug addiction, researchers at Medical University of South Carolina are the first to demonstrate that the noninvasive brain stimulation technique can dampen brain activity in response to drug cues in chronic alcohol users and chronic cocaine users. The findings are published in Biological

In a study of mice, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers describe a new circuit involved in fine-tuning the brain’s decision either to hide or confront threats. The study, published in Nature, was partially funded by the NIH’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. “Being able to manipulate specific circuits can uncover surprising relationships

A team of researchers led by Dr. Catharine Winstanley at the University of British Columbia have uncovered a network of regions in the brain that are involved in determining the choice of working harder to get a bigger reward, or putting in a lesser effort and receiving a smaller reward. Understanding how the brain makes

Neuroscientists have found new evidence on how distinct memories of similar events are represented in the brain. Its findings, which appear in the journal Neuron, correct a previous misconception of how such memories are stored in the hippocampus — a part of the brain crucial for memory and understanding space. “Previous research suggested that brain

Scientists have shone new light on how the human brain uses past experiences and generalizes them to future events, helping us safely navigate the world around us, a study in eLife reveals. Our ability to ‘generalize’ is an important survival technique, but over-generalizing from bad events could explain why some people fear and then avoid

Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beer-Sheva, Israel have demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of a robotic system that plays Tic Tac Toe with rehabilitation patients to improve real-life task performance. The interdisciplinary research team designed a game with a robotic arm to simulate “3D Functional Activities of Daily Living”

During a stroke or an epileptic seizure, neurons in affected parts of the brain fire at an abnormally rapid rate. One byproduct of this condition is that the pH of the brain drops markedly, rendering the local environment inhospitably acidic. Using a powerful microscopy method called cryo-EM, biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have

Neuroscience has studied music for decades, and it has been found to activate both the cortical and deeper brain areas. Neuroscience of dance, instead, is a young but quickly growing field. In her doctoral dissertation, Master of Science Hanna Poikonen developed methods for understanding the processes that dance generates in the cortex at the Cognitive

If 95 percent of your neighbors are chatty and outgoing, you probably know more about them than the 5 percent who are reclusive and shy. It’s similar for neuroscientists who study the striatum, a brain region associated with action control and learning: they know a lot more about the 95 percent of neurons that communicate

MIT neuroscientists have developed a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sensor that allows them to monitor neural activity deep within the brain by tracking calcium ions. Because calcium ions are directly linked to neuronal firing — unlike the changes in blood flow detected by other types of MRI, which provide an indirect signal — this