What if a painless zap to the brain could improve your ability to do math? Would you do it?
It may sound weird, but a new, small study of 25 people has shown that something like this may work. Researchers from the U.K. and Austria found that something called transcranial random noise stimulation helped people learn certain arithmetic faster. The effect still appeared when the researchers tested their study volunteers again six months later.
There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.
The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.
Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year. Nonetheless, the hiring raised some eyebrows, since Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent proselytizer of “hard AI,” which argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being. Add to this Google’s revelation that it is using techniques of deep learning to produce an artificial brain, and a subsequent hiring of the godfather of computer neural nets Geoffrey Hinton, and it would seem that Google is becoming the most daring developer of AI, a fact that some may consider thrilling and others deeply unsettling. Or both.
Human moves rat’s tail with thoughts alone
Last month, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? We spoke to the experts to find out.
The flexible needles could help doctors deliver stem cells to broader areas of the brain with fewer injections. Such therapies are being investigated for Parkinson’s diseases, stroke and other neurodegenerative diseases
Scientists say they have published the most detailed brain scans “the world has ever seen” as part of a project to understand how the organ works.
Our brain is the source of everything that makes us human: language, creativity, rationality, emotion, communication, culture, and politics. Now, researchers are set to repair brain functions, to create mind-machine interfaces, and enhance human mental capacities in radical ways.
Predicting the future of health care is a tricky business. At any point, there could be a big breakthrough in, say, cancer research, throwing the whole thing off. Or a new technology could come along in another sector, disrupting health care just as a side effect (much like the smartphone has already done). FutureMed, a weeklong program from Singularity University for doctors and others in the health care industry, looks at the ways that technology could change health care in the coming years. I spent a day at Singularity’s classroom (located at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley) to soak up some of the predictions. Here are some of the biggest takeaways.
Stroke survivors, as well as patients suffering from other serious conditions, may have to deal with the partial or complete inability to move one or more of their limbs. In the most severe cases, the sufferer may become fully paralyzed and in need of permanent assistance.
The TOBI project (Tools for brain-computer interaction) is financed by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) and is coordinated by EPFL. Since 2008 it has focused on the use of the signals transmitted by the brain. The electrical activity that takes place in the brain when the patient focuses on a particular task such as lifting an arm is detected by electroencephalography (EEG) through electrodes placed in a cap worn by the patient. Subsequently, a computer reads the signals and turns them into concrete actions as, for instance, moving a cursor on a screen.
A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head — demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated (formed from a stem cell) neuron into another within the brain.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technologyscientists found that carbon nanotubes offer the potential to establish functional links between neurons that could fight disease and enhance our brains.
The human brain is an extraordinary computing machine. Nobody understands exactly how it works its magic but part of the trick is the ability to store and process information at the same time.
That’s entirely unlike conventional computers which store information in random access memory or on hard disc and shuttle it back and forth as required to a central processing unit.
The time and energy all this takes is the thing that ultimately limits conventional computing performance, the so-called von Neumann bottleneck. Essentially, it is this that prevents conventional computers from approaching the performance of biological ones.
Ultrasound is often used to destroy cancerous cells. The sound waves emitted from an ultrasonic device raise the temperature of diseased cells, causing them to die. But there’s a limit to how intense the sound wave can be — too much and they’ll damage the surrounding healthy tissue.
