Posts tagged brainwaves
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Watch A French Researcher Control A Robot With His Brain
Researchers in Japan are using a brain-machine interface to control the actions of a humanoid robot. The goal is to allow people “to feel embodied in the body of a humanoid robot,” in the words of one researcher.
Roboticists at the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Japanese Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, are trying to interpret brain waves into actions that can be understood by a robot. In the video, a volunteer wears an electrode cap and watches a screen with flashing dots, which is used to teach his brain to associate flickering objects with actions. By focusing his attention, he can induce actions, which are translated from his brain activity into robotic motion.
A signal processing unit on a computer translates his brain activity and classifies it into a series of tasks. Then the team can instruct the robot on which task to perform. It could help paraplegics who can’t perform certain tasks on their own. Or it could be used for crazyfuture tourism, says Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the JRL: “A paraplegic patient in Rome would be able to pilot a humanoid robot for sightseeing in Japan.”
Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead percussionist, and neurologist Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D., professor at the University of California San Francisco made history by becoming the first to sonify and visualize brain activity in real time in front of a live audience. The two did so at the closing session of Life @50+, the AARP National Event & Expo in New Orleans on September 22nd.
Brain and brain waves in epilepsy
Caption: 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of a brain (seen from the front), overlaid with an electroencephalogram (EEG) of a 17-year-old’s brain during an epileptic episode (chaotic brain activity). This EEG shows generalized epilepsy, where the whole brain cortex is affected: all the EEG traces show chaotic brain waves. Epilepsy can have many causes, but when the cause is unknown, as here, it is called essential epilepsy. An EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp. The electrode locations are labelled at far left, on diagrams of the head seen from above, with the front of the head at left.
Brain’s Code for Visual Working Memory Deciphered in Monkeys
The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object.
Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, a grantee of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and colleagues, report their findings Nov. 1, 2012, online, in the journal Science Express.
“This work demonstrates, for the first time, that there is information about short term memories reflected in in-sync brainwaves,” explained Gray.
“The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain. This study provides more evidence that large scale electrical oscillations across distant brain regions may carry information for visual memories,” said NIMH director Thomas R. Insel, M.D.
Prior to the study, scientists had observed synchronous patterns of electrical activity between the two circuit hubs after a monkey saw an object, but weren’t sure if the signals actually represent such short-term visual memories in the brain. Rather, it was thought that such neural oscillations might play the role of a traffic cop, directing information along brain highways.
Mind over machine: Use your brainwaves to control your computer
When it comes to controlling our computers, the last five years has seen incredible improvements in user interfaces including amazing touch screens and much more natural vocal recognition. Now, a Toronto company wants to take the UI to the next level — by going directly to the brain. You think it, and the Muse headband will make it happen under very limited circumstances.
InteraXon, the maker of the Muse headband, has listed it device on Indiegogo in hopes of raising $150,000 for building out a mass-produced headband that translates your mental commands into a computer action. The example they show on the site is playing a game using an iPad, where the rotation of a wooden block occurs when the user focuses on it. The user tilts the iPad to change the angle of the rotation.
The ideas behind the Muse are echoed in a project released by Chaotic Moon Studios earlier this year called the Board of Imagination, whereby a user controls a skateboard that connected to an iPad and a brainwave reader made by a different company called Emotiv. In that use case, the user’s focus is what makes the skateboard move forward.
Brain waves reveal video game aptitude
Scientists report that they can predict who will improve most on an unfamiliar video game by looking at their brain waves. They describe their findings in a paper in the journal Psychophysiology.
The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to peek at electrical activity in the brains of 39 study subjects before they trained on Space Fortress, a video game developed for cognitive research. The subjects whose brain waves oscillated most powerfully in the alpha spectrum (about 10 times per second, or 10 hertz) when measured at the front of the head tended to learn at a faster rate than those whose brain waves oscillated with less power, the researchers found. None of the subjects were daily video game players.
The EEG signal was a robust predictor of improvement on the game, said University of Illinois postdoctoral researcher and Beckman Fellow Kyle Mathewson, who led the research with psychology professors and Beckman Institute faculty members Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton.
“By measuring your brain waves the very first time you play the game, we can predict how fast you’ll learn over the next month,” Mathewson said. The EEG results predicted about half of the difference in learning speeds between study subjects, he said.
The Power of Music: Mind Control by Rhythmic Sound
You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental processes?
The mystery runs deeper than previously thought, according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound “not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the group become synchronized.”
This finding extends the well-known power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception. This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.
Robot Suit HAL
“Robot Suit HAL" is a cyborg-type robot that can supplement, expand or improve physical capability.
When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneurons, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence. At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. “HAL” catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint in unison with the wearer’s muscle movement, enabling HAL to support the wearer’s daily activities. This is what we call a ‘voluntary control system’ that provides movement interpreting the wearer’s intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement. Not only a ‘voluntary control system’ “HAL” has, but also a ‘robotic autonomous control system’ that provides human-like movement based on a robotic system which integrally work together with the ‘autonomous control system’. “HAL” is the world’s first cyborg-type robot controlled by this unique Hybrid System.
"HAL" is expected to be applied in various fields such as rehabilitation support and physical training support in medical field, ADL support for disabled people, heavy labour support at factories, and rescue support at disaster sites, as well as in the entertainment field.
(Source: cyberdyne.jp)
Alpha Waves Close Your Mind for Distraction, but Not Continuously, Research Suggests
Alpha waves were long ignored, but gained interest of brain researchers recently. Electrical activity of groups of brain cells results in brain waves with different amplitudes. The so-called alpha wave, a slow brain wave with a cycle of 100 milliseconds, seems to play a key role in suppressing irrelevant brain activity. The current hypothesis is that this alpha wave is associated with pulses of inhibition (every 100 ms) in the brain.
Mathilde Bonnefond and Ole Jensen (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen) discovered that when distracting information can be anticipated in time there is an increase of the power of this alpha wave just before the distracter. Furthermore, the brain is able to precisely control the alpha wave so that the pulse of inhibition is maximal when the distracter appears. Indeed, between pulses of inhibition, there is still a window where the brain is excitable.
'It is like briefly opening a door to look what's happening outside. This enables us to detect an unexpected but important or dangerous event. But to avoid to be distracted by completely irrelevant information, it is better if the inhibition is active when a distracter is presented. It could be seen as a mechanism slamming the door of the brain on intruders'. The results are published by the scientific journal Current Biology at October 4.
Mark Mallman plans to create music for seven straight days and nights by wiring himself up to sensors that translate his brain waves into music around the clock.
(Source: wired.co.uk)