Purkinje neurons (yellow) generated from embryonic stem cells integrate into the cerebellum (red) when transplanted into the fetal mouse brain.

© 2010 K. Muguruma et al.

Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of The New York Times bestseller "The Singularity Is Near", is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities.

Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step:  reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.

Drawing on the most recent neuroscience research, his own research and inventions in artificial intelligence, and compelling thought experiments, he describes his new theory of how the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) works: as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers. Kurzweil shows how these insights will enable us to greatly extend the powers of our own mind and provides a roadmap for the creation of superintelligence—humankind’s most exciting next venture. We are now at the dawn of an era of radical possibilities in which merging with our technology will enable us to effectively address the world’s grand challenges.

How to Create a Mind is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books in many years—a touchstone for any consideration of the path of human progress.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that the cloud will help expand the capacity of the human brain beyond its current limitations.

Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will eventually do more than store our emails or feed us streaming movies on demand: it’s going to help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits.

In a question-and-answer session following a speech to the DEMO technology conference in Santa Clara, California last week, Kurzweil described the human brain as impressive but limited in its capacity to hold information. “By the time we’re even 20, we’ve filled it up,” he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to “repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.” (Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk.)

The solution to overcoming the brain’s limitations, he added, involves “basically expanding our brains into the cloud.”

Kurzweil is one of the more prominent advocates of the technological Singularity, or the idea that computers will become super-intelligent and self-replicating, essentially reducing human progress to a sideshow. He is an optimist in this scenario, arguing in talks and books that the Singularity will effectively make humanity immortal by allowing us to transfer our consciousness into non-organic systems.

The Marshmallow Study Revisited

For the past four decades, the “marshmallow test” has served as a classic experimental measure of children’s self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations [Video]

"Our results definitely temper the popular perception that marshmallow-like tasks are very powerful diagnostics for self-control capacity," says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study to be published online October 11 in the journal Cognition.

Target for obesity drugs comes into focus

Researchers at the University of Michigan have determined how the hormone leptin, an important regulator of metabolism and body weight, interacts with a key receptor in the brain.

Leptin is a hormone secreted by fat tissue that has been of interest for researchers in obesity and Type 2 diabetes since it was discovered in 1995. Like insulin, leptin is part of a regulatory network that controls intake and expenditure of energy in the body, and a lack of leptin or resistance to it has been linked to obesity in people.

Although there can be several complex reasons behind leptin resistance, in some cases the underlying cause is malfunction of the leptin receptor in the brain. An understanding of how leptin and its receptor interact could lead to new treatments for obesity and metabolic disorders, but the structure of this signaling complex has evaded researchers for years.

Georgios Skiniotis, a faculty member at the Life Sciences Institute and assistant professor in biological chemistry at the U-M Medical School, employed electron microscopy to obtain the first picture of the interaction between leptin and its receptor.

Skiniotis also traced similarities between the leptin receptor and other receptors of the same family, which may provide insight into new targets for treatment of other hormone-related diseases.

Engineered flies spill secret of seizures

In a newly reported set of experiments that show the value of a particularly precise but difficult genetic engineering technique, researchers at Brown University and the University of California–Irvine have created a Drosophila fruit fly model of epilepsy to discern the mechanism by which temperature-dependent seizures happen.

The researchers used a technique called homologous recombination — a more precise and sophisticated technique than transgenic gene engineering — to give flies a disease-causing mutation that is a direct analogue of the mutation that leads to febrile epileptic seizures in humans. They observed the temperature-dependent seizures in whole flies and also observed the process in their brains. What they discovered is that the mutation leads to a breakdown in the ability of certain cells that normally inhibit brain overactivity to properly regulate their electrochemical behavior.

In addition to providing insight into the neurology of febrile seizures, said Robert Reenan, professor of biology at Brown and a co-corresponding author of the paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study establishes

“This is the first time anyone has introduced a human disease-causing mutation overtly into the same gene that flies possess,” Reenan said.