Turn your dreams into music

Computer scientists in Finland have developed a method that automatically composes music out of sleep measurements. The composition service works live on the Web at sleepmusicalization.net

Developed under Hannu Toivonen, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland, the software automatically composes synthetic music using data related to a person’s own sleep as input. The composition program is the work of Aurora Tulilaulu, a student of Professor Toivonen.

"The software composes a unique piece based on the stages of sleep, movement, heart rate and breathing. It compresses a night’s sleep into a couple of minutes," she describes.

With the exception of low-level body-hacking, transhumanism is an expensive business. From genetic modification and cryonics to robo-prosthetics and smart drugs, it’s the playground of the privileged. But if a wealthy pioneer chooses to genetically engineer their perfect sproglet, who picks up the bill when it all goes wrong? And at what point does a perceived enhancement become so popular that it becomes the norm?

Steve Fuller believes that as people experiment with more enhancements, there is an impact on human identity as a whole, since the notion of enhancement relies on our understanding of what it means to be physically or mentally “normal”. This understanding, in turn, informs discussions about discrimination and justice. For example, according to the Equality Act 2010, businesses that provide a service to the public must make reasonable adjustments to their premises to give disabled access. What happens if bionic retinas with night vision or augmented reality becomes the norm? Should there be NHS provisions for the minority that don’t have access to the technology?

Furthermore, what happens if technological advances in prosthetics and exoskeletons mean that we no longer see what we currently perceive as disability in the same way? “At the moment construction issues around disability [disability parking spaces etc] presuppose that it’s an unfortunate thing.”

Fuller points out that it’s misguided to see transhumanism as a simple matter of individual choice since it has the potential to have a major impact on public policy and welfare provision. “We need to keep track of the kind of choices people are making. And if we are going to encourage it, we need to make it possible for everyone to have the opportunity to be involved.”

Science Confirms the Obvious: Literature is Good for Your Brain

In news that probably isn’t going to blow your mind, researchers have found that reading is good for your brain. But it’s not as straightforward as “book learnin’ is good for you.” By asking a test group of literary PhD candidates to read a Jane Austen novel inside of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a Stanford researcher has found that critical, literary reading and leisure reading provide different kinds of neurological workouts, both of which constitute “truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.”

Babies’ ability to detect complex rules in language outshines that of adults

New research examining auditory mechanisms of language learning in babies has revealed that infants as young as three months of age are able to automatically detect and learn complex dependencies between syllables in spoken language. By contrast, adults only recognized the same dependencies when asked to actively search for them. The study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig also highlights the important role of basic pitch discrimination abilities for early language development.

Cross a crow and it’ll remember you for years. Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative, as well as positive, feelings. The way the brain activates during that process is something the two species also appear to share, according to new research being published this week.

"The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans," said John Marzluff, University of Washington professor of environmental and forest sciences. "These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.

"For example it appears that birds have a region of their brain that is analogous to the amygdala of mammals," he said. "The amygdala is the region of the vertebrate brain where negative associations are stored as memories. Previous work primarily concerned its function in mammals while our work shows that a similar system is at work in birds. Our approach could be used in other animals – such as lizards and frogs – to see if the process is similar in those vertebrates as well."

Marzluff is the lead author of a paper being published the week of Sept. 10 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How does one’s experience of an event get translated into a memory that can be accessed months, even years later?

A team led by University of Pennsylvania scientists has come closer to answering that question, identifying key molecules that help convert short-term memories into long-term ones. These proteins may offer a target for drugs that can enhance memory, alleviating some of the cognitive symptoms that characterize conditions including schizophrenia, depression and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

“There are many drugs available to treat some of the symptoms of diseases like schizophrenia,” Abel -Penn’s Brush Family Professor of Biology- said, “but they don’t treat the cognitive deficits that patients have, which can include difficulties with memory. This study looks for more specific targets to treat deficits in cognition.”

Published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the study focused on a group of proteins called nuclear receptors, which have been implicated in the regulation of a variety of biological functions, including memory formation.

Researchers have discovered how to store diverse forms of artificial short-term memories in isolated brain tissue. The advance paves the way for future research to identify the specific brain circuits that allow humans to form short-term memories.

Using isolated pieces of rodent brain tissue, the researchers demonstrated that they could form a memory of which one of four input pathways was activated. The neural circuits contained within small isolated sections of the brain region called the hippocampus maintained the memory of stimulated input for more than 10 seconds. The information about which pathway was stimulated was evident by the changes in the ongoing activity of brain cells.

"The type of activity we triggered in isolated brain sections was similar to what other researchers have demonstrated in monkeys taught to perform short-term memory tasks," according to Mr. Hyde. "Both types of memory-related activity changes typically lasted for 5-10 seconds."

The researchers also demonstrated that they could generate memories for specific contexts, such as whether a particular pathway was activated alone or as part of a sequence of stimuli to different inputs. Changes in ongoing activity of hippocampal neurons accurately distinguished between two temporal sequences, akin to humans recognizing the difference between two different song melodies. The artificial memories Dr. Strowbridge’s group created in the hippocampus continued to recognize each sequence even when the interval between stimuli was changed.

Research at Sandia National Laboratories has shown that it’s possible to predict how well people will remember information by monitoring their brain activity while they study. 

A team under Laura Matzen of Sandia’s cognitive systems group was the first to demonstrate predictions based on the results of monitoring test volunteers with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors. 

For example, “if you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You’re going to forget this, you should study this again,’ or tell them, ‘OK, you got it and go on to the next thing,’” Matzen said.

The study, funded under Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program (LDRD), had two parts: predicting how well someone will remember what’s studied and predicting who will benefit most from memory training.