Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 79

Harnessing Your Marilyn Monroe Neurons

Deep in your brain there are probably several thousand neurons that will respond only to the sight of Lady Gaga. Several thousand others probably only crackle to the sight of Justin Bieber. It might be nice to reassign those neurons to loftier thoughts. For now, though, neurology can't help you. What neurology can do for you (if you're up for a little invasive brain surgery) is let you use those Gaga and Bieber neurons to control a computer.

In an unprecedented fusion of pop culture and neurosurgery, scientists at Caltech have invented a surreal brain-machine interface. The history leading up to this discovery goes back to the 1990s, when Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at UCLA, began to collaborate with neuroscientists who wanted to probe the brain from the inside. Fried would sometimes have to perform surgery on people with epilepsy in order to reduce their seizures. First he would implant electrodes in the brains of his patients, so that he could unleash small bursts of current from them. When one of the electrodes triggered epilepsy-like firing from the neighboring neurons, he knew he had found the patch of brain that had to be removed. Sometimes Fried would also implant thin wires into the same regions of the brain that could detect the activity of the neurons in the neighborhood. He then closed up the heads of his patients, and they spent several days hanging out in the hospital with electrodes and wires trailing from their heads. The neuroscientists could show them various pictures or play them various sounds, and listen to the response from the neurons. In some cases, the wires were positioned right next to individual neurons, allowing the scientists to listen

Fried's collaborators discovered that some of these individual neurons responded faithfully to certain kinds of sights. Some only responded to faces with sad expressions, others only to happy faces. Some only responded to houses. In 2005, however, Christof Koch of Caltech and his colleagues decided to get more fine-grained. They showed pictures of actors and actresses. They found individual neurons that responded almost exclusivey to Jennifer Aniston. Others only responded to Saddam Hussein, others to Pamela Anderson, and so on.

Later, the researchers found that people can develop these so-called "Jennifer Aniston neurons" for anyone they become familiar with in a matter of days. The neurons start out relatively weak, but get stronger with familiarity. The picture of a loved one will trigger a loved-one neuron to fire a lot more strongly than a neuron dedicated to an obscure D-list celebrity. Fortunately, these neurons are not limited to Hollywood celebrities. They seem to be the medium in which we encode any kind of concept. We probably can store ten to thirty thousand concepts in our brains, each of which is encoded in an estimated several thousand Jennifer Anniston neurons. (I talk more about the history of this research in Brain Cuttings, and in this column for Discover.)

In a flash of mad genius, Koch and his colleagues wondered if people could use biofeedback to control the strength of these neurons. They interviewed twelve patients, and in each case they identified four celebrities who triggered particularly strong responses from their individual neurons. Then they superimposed two of those celebrities–in one case, Josh Brolin and Marylyn Monroe–on a computer screen. The patients were told to try to shift the picture to one celebrity or the other. The computer was programmed to alter the balance of the images in response to the firing of the Brolin and Monroe neurons. As the Monroe neurons got stronger and the Brolin neurons weaker, for example, the screen would go all Monroe.

This movie shows what happened. On the early trials, the image of the screen sometimes veered back and forth between Brolin and Monroe, as if shifting between channels. But within a few trials, patients could get the hang of the game and push the screen to the correct image in a matter of seconds.

For now, this technology is profoundly limited. There's no way to eavesdrop on individual neurons from the outside of the brain, so invasive brain surgery is mandatory. But this technology does have some big advantages over other brain-machine interfaces. Up till now, these devices have typically allowed people to control a cursor on a screen or a robotic limb. But this new system taps directly into the concepts of our minds. Someday it might be possible to choose among thousands of concepts to put up on a computer screen for all to see. Let's just hope that if that marvelous day ever comes, we can think about things worth sharing.

Reference: Cerf et al, On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons. Nature, October 28, 2010. doi:10.1038/nature09510

"Dude, you are speaking Romulan"

Okay, if scientists won't listen to me tell them they have to learn how to speak in plain English, maybe another scientist can drive the point home. From the intriguing blog The Plainspoken Scientist, via Colin Schultz.

Portraits of the Mind: The Loom's First Photoessay!

A few months ago a neuroscientist named Carl Schoonover sent me the galleys of a coffee table book made for my kind of coffee table. It's a visual history of the brain, using images to tell the story of neuroscience from its earliest roots to today's awesome brain scans and micrographs. The book, called Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century is just out. So rather than just blurb and run, I thought I'd share a peek into it with you.

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An Evolutionary Psychologist Fights Back

[image error]One of my favorite discoveries in the blogoverse is the Evolutionary Psychology blog, by Rob Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania. Evolutionary psychology had an explosive debut in the 1990s, becoming the subject of best-sellers and well-attended conferences. In recent years, a backlash has emerged, and while some criticisms have been justified, a lot of critics either attack straw men or make counterarguments that have serious flaws of their own. Evolutionary psychologists have been defending themselves, but in a relatively scattershot way. Kurzban started his blog in September, and seems to be blogging pretty consistently, and is offering some cogent and entertaining take-downs of the shabbier examples of evo-psycho backlash. I hope the backlashers jump into the comment threads!

PS–Someone has to fix the formatting on Kurzban's blog. The excerpts look like one-sentence posts….

PPS–Talk about throwing stones from a glass house. Sorry about the headline typo. Now fixed.

An Evolutionary Psychologist Fight Back

[image error]One of my favorite discoveries in the blogoverse is the Evolutionary Psychology blog, by Rob Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania. Evolutionary psychology had an explosive debut in the 1990s, becoming the subject of best-sellers and well-attended conferences. In recent years, a backlash has emerged, and while some criticisms have been justified, a lot of critics either attack straw men or make counterarguments that have serious flaws of their own. Evolutionary psychologists have been defending themselves, but in a relatively scattershot way. Kurzban started his blog in September, and seems to be blogging pretty consistently, and is offering some cogent and entertaining take-downs of the shabbier examples of evo-psycho backlash. I hope the backlashers jump into the comment threads!

PS–Someone has to fix the formatting on Kurzban's blog. The excerpts look like one-sentence posts….

Got satellite radio? I'll be talking about weird life at 1 pm EST today on XM171 and SR147

I'm going to be a guest on Road Dog Trucking Radio, the satellite radio channel for truckers. I'm going to talk about parasites, viruses, and other weird critters. Even if you don't drive a big rig, you're welcome to tune in.

Brain Cuttings goes podcast!

Chris Mooney, my fellow Discover blogger, hosts a podcast called Point of Inquiry, and I'm the guest on his new episode. On the occasion of the publication of Brain Cuttings, we talk about the thinking glue that holds our brains together, Francis Collins's views on the evolution of morality, and the future of books. Check it out!

Dengue on the march: My new podcast

On my latest podcast, I take a look at dengue fever, a viral disease that's infecting some 50 million people a year and is even turning up in the United States. I talk to Thomas Scott of UC Davis about how this cunning virus takes advantage of human networks to spread its aches, pains, bleeding, and death. Check it out.

Reminder: Wednesday 10/20 in New York–Creation Screening and Panel Discussion

[image error]Tomorrow I'll be in New York to host a special screening of the movie Creation, a fictionalized account of Darwin's life starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. It's a collaboration between the Science and Arts program at CUNY and the Imagine Science Film Festival (for which I'm serving as judge) and the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

Before the movie, I'll moderate a talk with the director, John Amiel; Randal Keynes, the author of the book on which the movie is based; and biologists Cliff Tabin and Sean Carroll (of deep homology fame). It should be an excellent evening.

Here are the details:

Wednesday, Oct 20, 7:00 PM

CUNY Graduate Center

Elebash Recital Hall

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY

(Map)

No reservations. First come, first seated.

Brain Cuttings at Mind Hacks and Neurotribes

Thanks to two of my favorite brain bloggers for taking an interest in Brain Cuttings.

Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks offers up a classic book review for something that is not quite a book:

Whether you are an enthusiast, a professional psychologist or neuroscientist, or a combination, you will probably learn much from the book due to its breadth of vision. Regardless of who you are you are sure to enjoy the engaging immersions in some of the most interesting ideas in contemporary science.

And over at Neurotribes, science writer Steve Silberman publishes a conversation he and I had the other day on what ebooks mean for our ilk, and our readers. This was not an interview, with pat questions that could have been programmed into a computer. This was instead a long talk, because the subject is something that interests us both. In fact, Silberman wrote a Wired article back in the last century–1998–about the first glimpse of ebooks. Check it out.