Control your environment through brain commands

Many patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and other neurodegenerative conditions live every day with a frustrating inability to do small, everyday tasks, such as turning on the lights, changing the volume on the TV, or even communicating with their friends and loved ones.

Today, a first-ever proof of concept demonstrates how wearable technology and consumer products can be brought together with digital innovations to let a person with no mobility control their environment using brain commands, via a custom-built tablet application and wearable display interface.

This proof of concept demonstrates the potential to improve the quality of life for ALS patients – or any person with limited muscle and speech function – by giving them the ability to interact, communicate and issue commands without moving their body or using their voice.

Read more

Socioeconomic status and structural brain development

Recent advances in neuroimaging methods have made accessible new ways of disentangling the complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors that influence structural brain development. In recent years, research investigating associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain development have found significant links between SES and changes in brain structure, especially in areas related to memory, executive control, and emotion. This review focuses on studies examining links between structural brain development and SES disparities of the magnitude typically found in developing countries. We highlight how highly correlated measures of SES are differentially related to structural changes within the brain.

Full Article

Chimps Outplay Humans in Brain Games

We humans assume we are the smartest of all creations. In a world with over 8.7 million species, only we have the ability to understand the inner workings of our body while also unraveling the mysteries of the universe. We are the geniuses, the philosophers, the artists, the poets and savants. We amuse at a dog playing ball, a dolphin jumping rings, or a monkey imitating man because we think of these as remarkable acts for animals that, we presume, aren’t smart as us. But what is smart? Is it just about having ideas, or being good at language and math?

Scientists have shown, time and again, that many animals have an extraordinary intellect. Unlike an average human brain that can barely recall a vivid scene from the last hour, chimps have a photographic memory and can memorize patterns they see in the blink of an eye. Sea lions and elephants can remember faces from decades ago. Animals also have a unique sense perception. Sniffer dogs can detect the first signs of colon cancer by the scents of patients, while doctors flounder in early diagnosis. So the point is animals are smart too. But that’s not the upsetting realization. What happens when, for just once, a chimp or a dog challenges man to one of their feats? Well, for one, a precarious face-off – like the one Matt Reeves conceived in the Planet of the Apes – would seem a tad less unlikely than we thought.

In a recent study by psychologists Colin Camerer and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, chimps and humans played a strategy game – and unexpectedly, the chimps outplayed the humans.

Read more

(Image: Shutterstock)

Neuroscience: Where is the brain in the Human Brain Project?

Launched in October 2013, the Human Brain Project (HBP) was sold by charismatic neurobiologist Henry Markram as a bold new path towards understanding the brain, treating neurological diseases and building information technology. It is one of two ‘flagship’ proposals funded by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme (see go.nature.com/icotmi). Selected after a multiyear competition, the project seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring together neuroscience and IT to generate practical applications for health and medicine (see go.nature.com/2eocv8).

Contrary to public assumptions that the HBP would generate knowledge about how the brain works, the project is turning into an expensive database-management project with a hunt for new computing architectures. In recent months, the HBP executive board revealed plans to drastically reduce its experimental and cognitive neuroscience arm, provoking wrath in the European neuroscience community.

The crisis culminated with an open letter from neuroscientists (including one of us, G.L.) to the European Commission on 7 July 2014 (see www.neurofuture.eu), which has now gathered more than 750 signatures. Many signatories are scientists in experimental and theoretical fields, and the list includes former HBP participants. The letter incorporates a pledge of non-participation in a planned call for ‘partnering projects’ that must raise about half of the HBP’s total funding. This pledge could seriously lower the quality of the project’s final output and leave the planned databases empty.

With the initial funding, or ‘ramp-up’, phase now in full swing, the European Commission is currently evaluating the HBP directors’ plan for the larger second part of the project. This offers an opportunity to introduce reforms and reconciliation. Here, we offer our analysis of how the HBP project strayed off course and how it might be steered back.

Read more

Status and the Brain

Social hierarchy is a fact of life for many animals. Navigating social hierarchy requires understanding one’s own status relative to others and behaving accordingly, while achieving higher status may call upon cunning and strategic thinking. The neural mechanisms mediating social status have become increasingly well understood in invertebrates and model organisms like fish and mice but until recently have remained more opaque in humans and other primates. In a new study in this issue, Noonan and colleagues explore the neural correlates of social rank in macaques. Using both structural and functional brain imaging, they found neural changes associated with individual monkeys’ social status, including alterations in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and brainstem—areas previously implicated in dominance-related behavior in other vertebrates. A separate but related network in the temporal and prefrontal cortex appears to mediate more cognitive aspects of strategic social behavior. These findings begin to delineate the neural circuits that enable us to navigate our own social worlds. A major remaining challenge is identifying how these networks contribute functionally to our social lives, which may open new avenues for developing innovative treatments for social disorders.

Full Article

Brain mechanism underlying the recognition of hand gestures develops even when blind

Does a distinctive mechanism work in the brain of congenitally blind individuals when understanding and learning others’ gestures? Or does the same mechanism as with sighted individuals work? Japanese researchers figured out that activated brain regions of congenitally blind individuals and activated brain regions of sighted individuals share common regions when recognizing human hand gestures. They indicated that a region of the neural network that recognizes others’ hand gestures is formed in the same way even without visual information. The findings are discussed in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Our brain mechanism perceives human bodies from inanimate objects and shows a particular response. A part of a region of the “visual cortex” that processes visual information supports this mechanism. Since visual information is largely used in perception, this is reasonable, however, for perception using haptic information and also for the recognition of one’s own gestures, it has been recently learned that the same brain region is activated. It came to be considered that there is a mechanism that is formed regardless of the sensory modalities and recognizes human bodies.

Blind and sighted individuals participated in the study of the research group of Assistant Professor Ryo Kitada of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, National Institutes of Natural Sciences. With their eyes closed, they were instructed to touch plastic casts of hands, teapots, and toy cars and identify the shape. As it turned out, sighted individuals and blind individuals could make an identification with the same accuracy. Through measuring the activated brain region using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for plastic casts of hands and not for teapots or toy cars, the research group was able to pinpoint a common activated brain region regardless of visual experience. On another front, it also revealed a region showing signs of activity that is dependent on the duration of the visual experience and it was also learned that this region functions as a supplement when recognizing hand gestures.

As Assistant Professor Ryo Kitada notes, “Many individuals are active in many parts of the society even with the loss of their sight as a child. Developmental psychology has been advancing its doctrine based on sighted individuals. I wish this finding will help us grasp how blind individuals understand and learn about others and be seen as an important step in supporting the development of social skills for blind individuals.”