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

Related articles The Human Brain Project Has Begun Building the Super Brain  The Human Brain Project Goals  The Brain's Visual Perception Areas Mapped In Breakthrough Study

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

Embed

 Simulation Argument  

Richard Dawkins and Brian Greene recently discussed the notion that our universe might be simulated - even created by a pimply teenager in his garage from the future.

W ith his paper, the Simulation Argument, Nick Bostrom suggested a series of assumptions namely, the human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage, any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history, and we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Related articles Infographic - Are We Living In A Computer Simulation?  Biological Underpinnings of Modular Networks May Help Create Advanced Artificial Intelligence  The End of Humanity: Nick Bostrom at TEDxOxford

Bostrom also held that “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become post-humans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

In the video above, Richard Dawkins' argument that we are probably not living in a simulation is that the simulation creator would have to be incredibly disciplined.  For example, in Second Life, a user can break the laws of physics and fly around.  In  our world we do not see any case where the laws of physics are arbitrarily breached.

Interestingly, the simulation argument has led some to point to it as evidence of a creator.


SOURCE  World Science Festival

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square