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It’s not just your age. It’s what you do while you’re aging, as these MRI scans show.
Link -via Swiss Miss | Photo: Physician and Sports Medicine
Remember
the Matrix where all you need to do to learn kung fu is to get it uploaded
to your brain? Well, that may soon be coming to real life:
New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
Link - via Science360
Two scientists placed human subjects and snakes inside a MRI machine to measure how the human body responds to fear. Scientific American reports how they did it, and why:
You are in an MRI machine. Your head is fixed in a round cage. Your body is rolled into a narrow tube. Magnetic pulses are beamed into your brain. A meter-and-a-half-long snake is strapped with Velcro atop a small box on a conveyor belt just inches behind your head. Your eyes meet the snake’s beady gaze through a tiny mirror above your head. You can’t move.
Why would Uri Nili and Yadin Dudai, two scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, want to put a snake in the MRI scanner with you? Obviously, not to scan the snake’s brain (although this might be an interesting possibility). They wanted to scan your brain while you perform an act of courage. They wanted to push research on fear one step further – from understanding how we passively react to fear, through actively avoiding it, to actually confronting it.
The subject could choose to move the snake closer or farther away in increments that the researchers called “snake-advance units”. As the subject altered the relative position of the snake, instruments examined changes in his/her body.
Link | Video (self-starting) | Photo by Flickr user RussBowling used under Creative Commons license
Brooklyn attorney David Zevin plans to submit an MRI scan as evidence in a sexual discrimination suit. This will mark the first time that a lie-detecting MRI has been used in a US court other than for the sentencing phase of a criminal trial:
So, Zevin had the coworker undergo an fMRI brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide “independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth.”
Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent. But some scientists and lawyers like New York University neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps doubts those results can be applied outside the lab.
“The data in their studies don’t appear to be reliable enough to use in a court of law,” Phelps said. “There is just no reason to think that this is going to be a good measure of whether someone is telling the truth.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: NIH
Not only is the placebo effect becoming stronger, but it’s now been imaged for the first time by researchers with fMRI machines. Falk Eippert at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany led the study:
Later, with an fMRI scanner on, the researchers rubbed “control” and “painkiller” creams onto two different spots on each volunteer’s left forearm and applied the same level of heat to each spot, 15 times.
The fake “painkiller” cream worked: volunteers said they experienced 26 per cent less pain on the “painkiller”-treated patch of their arm, compared with the “control”-treated area.
Meanwhile, the fMRI scanner witnessed the placebo effect. When skin treated with the “control” cream was heated, an area of the dorsal horn located on the left side of volunteers’ lower necks lit up, suggesting increased neural activity there in response to pain. However, this signal disappeared in the “painkiller” trials.
Link via Popular Science | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Brandon Keim writes in Wired that scientists are getting closer to reconstructing images that duplicate what the brain actually sees through visual input. Though it’s not actually brain-reading, it’s a small step in that direction:
To construct their model, the researchers used an fMRI machine, which measures blood flow through the brain, to track neural activity in three people as they looked at pictures of everyday settings and objects.
As in the earlier study, they looked at parts of the brain linked to the shape of objects. Unlike before, they looked at regions whose activity correlates with general classifications, such as “buildings” or “small groups of people.”
Once the model was calibrated, the test subjects looked at another set of pictures. After interpreting the resulting neural patterns, the researchers’ program plucked corresponding pictures from a database of 6 million images.
Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.
So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”
The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”
Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.
The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.
Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. Link -via reddit
