Brain Imaging  

Bridging the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech virtual realty, the Glass Brain, a project of the new Neuroscape Lab at the University of California San Francisco may open up new insights into the complicated mechanisms of the brain.

Researchers have developed a new way to explore the human brain through virtual reality. The system, called Glass Brain, initiated by Philip Rosedale, creator of the famous game Second Life, and Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, combines brain scanning, brain recording and virtual reality to allow a user to journey through a person’s brain in real-time.

 For a recent demonstration at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Rosedale made his wife a cap studded with electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes that measure differences in electric potential in order to record brain activity, while he wore a virtual reality headset to explore her brain in 3D, as flashes of light displayed her brain activity from the EEG.

The Glass Brain didn’t actually show what Rosedale’s wife was thinking, but Gazzaley’s team ultimately hopes to get closer to decoding brain signals and displaying them using the virtual reality system.

"High-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change."

Gazzaley and Rosedale are hoping to paint a fuller picture of what is happening in the minds and bodies of those suffering from brain disease with the new Neuroscape lab, which bridges the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech.

In the Neuroscape lab, wireless and mobile technologies set research participants free to move around and interact inside 3D environments, while scientists make functional recordings with an array of technologies. Gazzaley hopes this will bring his field closer to understanding how complex neurological and psychiatric diseases really work and help doctors like him re-purpose technologies built for fitness or fun into targeted therapies for their patients.

“I want us to have a platform that enables us to be more creative and aggressive in thinking how software and hardware can be a new medicine to improve brain health,” said Gazzaley, an associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center. “Often, high-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change.”

Image Source - Neuroscape Lab

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GlassBrain, a creation of the Neuroscape lab, creates vivid, color visualizations of the structures of the brain and the white matter that connects them, as they pulse with electrical activity in real time.

Whereas ordinary EEG recordings look like wavy horizontal lines, but GlassBrain turns the data into bursts of rhythmic activity that speed along golden spaghetti-like connections threading through a glowing, multi-colored glass-like image of a brain. Gazzaley is now looking at how to feed this information back to his subjects, for example by using the data from real-time EEG to make video games that adapt as people play them to selectively challenge weak brain processes.

Gazzaley has already used the technology to image the brain of former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart as he plays a hypnotic, electronic beat on a Roland digital percussion device with NeuroDrummer, a game the Gazzaley Lab is designing to enhance brain function through rhythmic training. Hart, whose brain is healthy, is collaborating with Gazzaley to develop the game and performed on NeuroDrummer while immersed in virtual reality on an Oculus Rift at the Neuroscape lab opening on March 5.

The Neuroscape lab will be available to all UCSF researchers who study the brain. Gazzaley ultimately hopes it will aid in the development of therapies to treat diseases as various as Alzheimer’s, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, autism, depression and multiple sclerosis.


SOURCE  UCSF

By 33rd Square

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 3D Printing  

Chilean company Thinker Thing has created the world’s first 3D printed object modeled using brain waves. The company’s Emotiv EPOC brain-computer headset allowed CTO George Lakowsky to 3D print an object just by thinking about it. The project uses neurological signals gathered from the user’s brain to print 3D objects.

In Santiago Chile, a group of makers has decided that moving from a 3D CAD program to a 3D printed object is too much work.  They want to bypass the middleman and as they state:

Our aim at Thinker Thing is to create the software to interface the latest neuro technological equipment with the latest in 3D printing machines to literally make objects with the power of thought. 

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This milestone was actually reached with little fanfare last month at the Santiago MakerSpace, a technology and design studio in the Chilean capital. An orange toy arm shape (pictured above) was determined according to the wishes of its designer, as gleaned from a headset picking up his brainwaves.

The man behind the breakthrough was George Laskowsky, Chief Technical Officer of Thinker Thing, the start-up now developing the mind-controlled 3D printing system.  “It is really something magical to be there, sat without moving a limb, and watching the designs evolve into something that you were thinking about,” Laskowsky told the BBC.

Engineers and designers have been using 3D printers for more than two decades. In the last few years, prices have tumbled and desktop devices are increasingly being pitched at consumers.

Most 3D printers build objects layer by layer from materials such as plastic or metal dust, a key advantage is the comparative freedom they give designers. Yet the design software to make 3D prints can be difficult to use.

“What is the point of these printers if my son cannot design his own toy?” says Bryan Salt, CEO of Thinker Thing. “I realised that while there were a lot of people talking about the hardware of the printer no-one really seemed to be talking about how to actually use it.” In theory 3D printers could help unleash our inner creativity, freeing us from the constraints of traditional production methods. However, in practice those unwilling or unable to plough through the software instruction manual could be left downloading ready- made models designed by others.

That’s where Emotional Evolutionary Design (EED), the software that allows Thinker Thing to interpret its users’ thoughts, comes in. Its current role is to power the Monster Dreamer Project, which will allow users to design their own fantastical creatures using the power of thought.

Once the system is ready, children sit in front of a computer running Monster Dreamer, they will be presented with a series of different body shapes in bubbles. These will mutate randomly, with built-in rules preventing them becoming too abstract.

Using an Emotiv EPOC headset, a $300 electroencephalography (EEG) device, the children’s reactions to the changes will be picked up. As different brain states such as excitement or boredom generate specific patterns of brain activity, the computer can identify the shapes associated with positive emotional responses. The favoured shapes will grow bigger on the screen, while the others shrink. The biggest shapes are combined to generate a body part, and the process is repeated for different body parts until the monster is complete. The final result should be a unique 3D model that is ready for printing as a solid object.

According to Professor Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University, “One of the biggest bottlenecks right now with 3D printing is content. We have iPods with no music. We have machines that can make almost anything but we do not have a lot of things to make with them.”

Lipson’s lab is also working on evolving 3D models with the mind. EndlessForms, created by two of Lipson’s students, is a website that mimics nature’s way of creating new designs in small steps. At the start of the process users are presented with 15 three-dimensional shapes. Clicking on any two will combine them and produce fifteen new shapes based on those choices. If you wanted to make a cat, you might click on one shape with the semblance of a muzzle and another with two pointed, ear-like triangles on top. The computer would then offer up a series of new shapes that more closely resemble the cat you have in mind, and so on until the model reaches the desired shape.

To reduce the time spent clicking, the researchers came to the same conclusion as the Thinker Thing team – feeding users’ thoughts back into the computer directly could make the process quicker. So, last year, the researchers also used Emotiv EPOC headsets to read users’ brain signals and therefore determine their reactions. There have been issues with this approach, but the researchers are continuing their work.  

These challenges suggest the idea of 3D printing guided by fully formed mental images of users is, if not entirely farfetched but do suggest a lot of work needs to be done. Combining sensors that can pick up human emotions with design software that can interpret and respond to them looks like the nearest we’re going to get to creating 3D objects from thought in the near future.

So Thinker Thing’s twig-like orange monster arm, as unsophisticated as it may appear at first glance, may one day be celebrated as marking the start of a new and exciting way of moulding the things around us.



SOURCE  BBC Future

By 33rd Square

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