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LeopoldS

Seasonality in human cognitive brain responses - 2 views

www.pnas.org/...1518129113.full.pdf

brain

shared by LeopoldS on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
jcunha liked it
  • LeopoldS on 10 Feb 16
     
    interesting study showing seasonal changes to brain functions Agata, you didn't tell us about this yet :-) "the present study provides compelling evidence for previously unappreciated annual varia- tions in the cerebral activity required to sustain ongoing cognitive processes in healthy volunteers. The data further show that this annual rhythmicity is cognitive-process-specific (i.e., the phase of the rhythm changes between cognitive tasks), speaking for a complex impact of season on human brain function. Annual var- iations in cognitive brain function may contribute to explain intraindividual cognitive changes that could emerge at specific times of year."
  • fichbio on 12 Feb 16
     
    Thank you for this interesting study. I will make a brief intro about it during our Wednesday meeting. Especially, that spring is coming...;)
Ma Ru

Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Syncing your brain: electric currents to enhance cognition - 0 views

www.cell.com/...S1364-6613%2814%2900055-2

technology BIO science neuroscience cognition

shared by Ma Ru on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Ma Ru on 28 Mar 14
     
    Yes, you read correctly. Apply current to your brain to get smarter. Ariadna anyone?
LeopoldS

PLOS ONE: Galactic Cosmic Radiation Leads to Cognitive Impairment and Increas... - 1 views

www.plosone.org/...10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0053275

radiation

shared by LeopoldS on 10 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 10 Jan 13
     
    Galactic Cosmic Radiation consisting of high-energy, high-charged (HZE) particles poses a significant threat to future astronauts in deep space. Aside from cancer, concerns have been raised about late degenerative risks, including effects on the brain. In this study we examined the effects of 56Fe particle irradiation in an APP/PS1 mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We demonstrated 6 months after exposure to 10 and 100 cGy 56Fe radiation at 1 GeV/µ, that APP/PS1 mice show decreased cognitive abilities measured by contextual fear conditioning and novel object recognition tests. Furthermore, in male mice we saw acceleration of Aβ plaque pathology using Congo red and 6E10 staining, which was further confirmed by ELISA measures of Aβ isoforms. Increases were not due to higher levels of amyloid precursor protein (APP) or increased cleavage as measured by levels of the β C-terminal fragment of APP. Additionally, we saw no change in microglial activation levels judging by CD68 and Iba-1 immunoreactivities in and around Aβ plaques or insulin degrading enzyme, which has been shown to degrade Aβ. However, immunohistochemical analysis of ICAM-1 showed evidence of endothelial activation after 100 cGy irradiation in male mice, suggesting possible alterations in Aβ trafficking through the blood brain barrier as a possible cause of plaque increase. Overall, our results show for the first time that HZE particle radiation can increase Aβ plaque pathology in an APP/PS1 mouse model of AD.
Thijs Versloot

Cognitive computing - 2 views

www.forbes.com/...puting-ushers-in-new-era-of-it

IT technology computing

shared by Thijs Versloot on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 04 Feb 14
     
    Has this not been underway for quite some time now? Not sure if this 'new era' is coming any day soon. Thoughts?
  • johannessimon81 on 06 Feb 14
     
    If they want to give the computers "senses" they should also go ahead and give them a body slightly taller than humans ...and guns. So once they reach a critical level of consciousness they can really go to town... http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/tg/image/1385/54/1385549501025.jpg
  • Paul N on 08 Feb 14
     
    Neural networks!!! However, indeed, "senses" will not make any sense towards human-like computing without bodies that physically interact with the world. That's where most of these things are going wrong. Perception and cognition are for action. Without action coming from the machine side all these ideas simply fail.
pacome delva

Divided Brains Are Smarter -- ScienceNOW - 0 views

sciencenow.sciencemag.org/...4

bio neuroscience brain cognition

shared by pacome delva on 03 Sep 09 - Cached
  • "The idea of a link between lateralization strength and cognitive abilities has been around ... for many years, but little comparative and experimental work has been done with animals." This study, he says, provides "fascinating confirmation of the link between higher cognition and brain asymmetry."
LeopoldS

Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain - 0 views

www.pnas.org/...1316909110

brain BIO neuro

shared by LeopoldS on 02 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 02 Dec 13
     
    it seems that there are indications that we are differently wired .... Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.
  • johannessimon81 on 03 Dec 13
     
    I like this abstract: sex, sex, sex, sex, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...!!! I wonder if the "sex differences" are related to gender-specific differences...
Tobias Seidl

Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network : Article : Nature - 2 views

www.nature.com/...nature08704.html

BIO navigation map

shared by Tobias Seidl on 04 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Tobias Seidl on 04 Feb 10
     
    This is the community that states mammals have cognitive maps. Good work, especially by the Moser-couple.
santecarloni

[1105.5170] Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations - 0 views

arxiv.org/1105.5170

Dunbar social science

shared by santecarloni on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • santecarloni on 30 May 11
     
    We test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's number. We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar's prediction.
ESA ACT

Long Working Hours and Cognitive Function: The Whitehall II Study -- Virtanen et al. 16... - 0 views

aje.oxfordjournals.org/...596

cognition

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    Working too much in not good for mental health, it's proven !
jcunha

Brain training: memory games - 3 views

www.nature.com/...531S10a.html

BIO science technology

shared by jcunha on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
fichbio liked it
  • jcunha on 03 Mar 16
     
    One article from this weeks Nature outlook articles about cognitive science. You can even play the cognitive game :). The full set of articles is quite interesting!
Isabelle Dicaire

Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates - NEJM - 7 views

www.nejm.org/...NEJMon1211064

shared by Isabelle Dicaire on 12 Oct 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 12 Oct 12
     
    Funny study about the correlation between chocolate consumption and Nobel laureates. Let's all eat chocolate then! :)
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 12 Oct 12
     
    And the winner is... Finally I know why I'm so smart :D. Would like to meet Dr. Messerli (verry Swiss name, by the way) and have some dark Lindt chocolate together!
  • LeopoldS on 14 Oct 12
     
    why Lindt chocolate ...??
  • Luzi Bergamin on 15 Oct 12
     
    "Dr. Messerli reports regular daily chocolate consumption, mostly but not exclusively in the form of Lindt's dark varieties."
Ma Ru

1st Symposium on Plant Signalling and Behaviour 2012 - 0 views

spsb2012.com

bio plants cognition science symposium conference cfp

shared by Ma Ru on 16 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Ma Ru on 16 Mar 12
     
    Something for the plant folks... assuming you have enough travel budget...
  • pandomilla on 17 Mar 12
     
    It is a nice conference indeed, I've been to many of the previous editions (they changed the name of the conference this year)...
Guido de Croon

Will robots be smarter than humans by 2029? - 2 views

robohub.org/be-smarter-than-humans-by-2029

AI

shared by Guido de Croon on 10 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Guido de Croon on 10 Mar 14
     
    Nice discussion about the singularity. Made me think of drinking coffee with Luis... It raises some issues such as the necessity of embodiment, etc.
  • ...9 more comments...
  • Luís F. Simões on 12 Mar 14
     
    "Kurzweilians"... LOL. Still not sold on embodiment, btw.
  • Ma Ru on 12 Mar 14
     
    The biggest problem with embodiment is that, since the passive walkers (with which it all started), it hasn't delivered anything really interesting...
  • Paul N on 13 Mar 14
     
    The problem with embodiment is that it's done wrong. Embodiment needs to be treated like big data. More sensors, more data, more processing. Just putting a computer in a robot with a camera and microphone is not embodiment.
  • Marcus Maertens on 14 Mar 14
     
    I like how he attacks Moore's Law. It always looks a bit naive to me if people start to (ab)use it to make their point. No strong opinion about embodiment.
  • johannessimon81 on 14 Mar 14
     
    @Paul: How would embodiment be done RIGHT?
  • Guido de Croon on 16 Mar 14
     
    Embodiment has some obvious advantages. For example, in the vision domain many hard problems become easy when you have a body with which you can take actions (like looking at an object you don't immediately recognize from a different angle) - a point already made by researchers such as Aloimonos.and Ballard in the end 80s / beginning 90s. However, embodiment goes further than gathering information and "mental" recognition. In this respect, the evolutionary robotics work by for example Beer is interesting, where an agent discriminates between diamonds and circles by avoiding one and catching the other, without there being a clear "moment" in which the recognition takes place. "Recognition" is a behavioral property there, for which embodiment is obviously important. With embodiment the effort for recognizing an object behaviorally can be divided between the brain and the body, resulting in less computation for the brain. Also the article "Behavioural Categorisation: Behaviour makes up for bad vision" is interesting in this respect. In the field of embodied cognitive science, some say that recognition is constituted by the activation of sensorimotor correlations. I wonder to which extent this is true, and if it is valid for extremely simple creatures to more advanced ones, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless. This being said, if "embodiment" implies having a physical body, then I would argue that it is not a necessary requirement for intelligence. "Situatedness", being able to take (virtual or real) "actions" that influence the "inputs", may be.
  • Ma Ru on 17 Mar 14
     
    @Paul While I completely agree about the "embodiment done wrong" (or at least "not exactly correct") part, what you say goes exactly against one of the major claims which are connected with the notion of embodiment (google for "representational bottleneck"). The fact is your brain does *not* have resources to deal with big data. The idea therefore is that it is the body what helps to deal with what to a computer scientist appears like "big data". Understanding how this happens is key. Whether it is the problem of scale or of actually understanding what happens should be quite conclusively shown by the outcomes of the Blue Brain project.
  • johannessimon81 on 17 Mar 14
     
    Wouldn't one expect that to produce consciousness (even in a lower form) an approach resembling that of nature would be essential? All animals grow from a very simple initial state (just a few cells) and have only a very limited number of sensors AND processing units. This would allow for a fairly simple way to create simple neural networks and to start up stable neural excitation patterns. Over time as complexity of the body (sensors, processors, actuators) increases the system should be able to adapt in a continuous manner and increase its degree of self-awareness and consciousness. On the other hand, building a simulated brain that resembles (parts of) the human one in its final state seems to me like taking a person who is just dead and trying to restart the brain by means of electric shocks.
  • Paul N on 17 Mar 14
     
    Actually on a neuronal level all information gets processed. Not all of it makes it into "conscious" processing or attention. Whatever makes it into conscious processing is a highly reduced representation of the data you get. However that doesn't get lost. Basic, low processed data forms the basis of proprioception and reflexes. Every step you take is a macro command your brain issues to the intricate sensory-motor system that puts your legs in motion by actuating every muscle and correcting every step deviation from its desired trajectory using the complicated system of nerve endings and motor commands. Reflexes which were build over the years, as those massive amounts of data slowly get integrated into the nervous system and the the incipient parts of the brain. But without all those sensors scattered throughout the body, all the little inputs in massive amounts that slowly get filtered through, you would not be able to experience your body, and experience the world. Every concept that you conjure up from your mind is a sort of loose association of your sensorimotor input. How can a robot understand the concept of a strawberry if all it can perceive of it is its shape and color and maybe the sound that it makes as it gets squished? How can you understand the "abstract" notion of strawberry without the incredibly sensible tactile feel, without the act of ripping off the stem, without the motor action of taking it to our mouths, without its texture and taste? When we as humans summon the strawberry thought, all of these concepts and ideas converge (distributed throughout the neurons in our minds) to form this abstract concept formed out of all of these many many correlations. A robot with no touch, no taste, no delicate articulate motions, no "serious" way to interact with and perceive its environment, no massive flow of information from which to chose and and reduce, will never attain human level intelligence. That's point 1. Point 2 is that mere pattern recogn
  • Ma Ru on 18 Mar 14
     
    All information *that gets processed* gets processed but now we arrived at a tautology. The whole problem is ultimately nobody knows what gets processed (not to mention how). In fact an absolute statement "all information" gets processed is very easy to dismiss because the characteristics of our sensors are such that a lot of information is filtered out already at the input level (e.g. eyes). I'm not saying it's not a valid and even interesting assumption, but it's still just an assumption and the next step is to explore scientifically where it leads you. And until you show its superiority experimentally it's as good as all other alternative assumptions you can make. I only wanted to point out is that "more processing" is not exactly compatible with some of the fundamental assumptions of the embodiment. I recommend Wilson, 2002 as a crash course.
  • Paul N on 24 Mar 14
     
    These deal with different things in human intelligence. One is the depth of the intelligence (how much of the bigger picture can you see, how abstract can you form concept and ideas), another is the breadth of the intelligence (how well can you actually generalize, how encompassing those concepts are and what is the level of detail in which you perceive all the information you have) and another is the relevance of the information (this is where the embodiment comes in. What you do is to a purpose, tied into the environment and ultimately linked to survival). As far as I see it, these form the pillars of human intelligence, and of the intelligence of biological beings. They are quite contradictory to each other mainly due to physical constraints (such as for example energy usage, and training time). "More processing" is not exactly compatible with some aspects of embodiment, but it is important for human level intelligence. Embodiment is necessary for establishing an environmental context of actions, a constraint space if you will, failure of human minds (i.e. schizophrenia) is ultimately a failure of perceived embodiment. What we do know is that we perform a lot of compression and a lot of integration on a lot of data in an environmental coupling. Imo, take any of these parts out, and you cannot attain human+ intelligence. Vary the quantities and you'll obtain different manifestations of intelligence, from cockroach to cat to google to random quake bot. Increase them all beyond human levels and you're on your way towards the singularity.
johannessimon81

Weather patterns on Exoplanet detected - 1 views

news.discovery.com/...chance-of-maelstrom-131001.htm

space science

shared by johannessimon81 on 02 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 02 Oct 13
     
    so it took us 70% of the time Earth is in the habitable zone to develop, would this be normal or could it be much faster? In other words, would all forms of life that started on a planet that originated at a 'similar' point in time like us, be equally far developed?
  • Paul N on 24 Oct 13
     
    That is actually quite tricky to estimate rly. If for no other reason than the fact that all of the mass extinctions we had over the Earth's history basically reset the evolutionary clock. Assuming 2 Earths identical in every way but one did not have the dinosaur wipe-out impact, that would've given non-impact Earth 60million years to evolve a potential dinosaur intelligent super race.
  • johannessimon81 on 25 Oct 13
     
    The opposite might be true - or might not be ;-). Since usually the rate of evolution increases after major extinction events the chance is higher to produce 'intelligent' organisms if these events happen quite frequently. Usually the time of rapid evolution is only a few million years - so Earth is going quite slow. Certainly extinction events don't reset the evolutionary clock - if they would never have happened Earth gene pool would probably be quite primitive. By the way: dinosaurs were a quite diverse group and large dinosaurs might well have had cognitive abilities that come close to whales or primates - the difference to us might be that we have hands to manipulate our environment and vocal cords to communicate in very diverse ways. Modern dinosaur (descendents), i.e. birds, contain some very intelligent species - especially with respect to their body size and weight.
jessyjemy

What happens to your brain on the way to Mars - 1 views

advances.sciencemag.org/...e1400256

brain mars astronauts science technology space

shared by jessyjemy on 06 May 15 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • jessyjemy on 06 May 15
     
    This study from NASA shows that cosmic rays have a deleterious effect on the brain, more than expected, resulting in in symptoms similar to dementia (memory loss, decline in problem solving skills, general cognitive functions). A reason more to investigate into hibernation?
LeopoldS

ACE Acronym CrEator - generate your own acronym! - 1 views

acronymcreator.net

INF fun

shared by LeopoldS on 07 Sep 10 - Cached
Ma Ru liked it
  • LeopoldS on 07 Sep 10
     
    this is how they do it :-)
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Ma Ru on 07 Sep 10
     
    Some highlights: ACuTE: Advanced Concepts TEam ADDiCT: ADvanceD Concepts Team AbDiCaTE: ADvanced Concepts TEam wASTEd: Advanced conceptS TEam
  • Ma Ru on 07 Sep 10
     
    But seriously, my PhD project title from now on becomes: Robotic mOdels maThematIcal Cognition (eROTIC)
  • LeopoldS on 07 Sep 10
     
    your thesis title fits perfectly then ...
Luís F. Simões

How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction - 4 views

www.sciencemag.org/...1279

AI cognition learning Bayesian probabilistic probabilistic computing

shared by Luís F. Simões on 21 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Luís F. Simões on 21 Mar 11
     
    a nice review on the wonders of Hierarchical Bayesian models. It cites a paper on probabilistic programming languages that might be relevant given our recent discussions. At Hippo's farewell lunch there was a discussion on how kids are able to learn something as complex as language from a limited amount of observations, while Machine Learning algorithms no matter how many millions of instances you throw at them, don't learn beyond some point. If that subject interested you, you might like this paper.
  • Ma Ru on 21 Mar 11
     
    Had an opportunity to listen to JBT and TLG during one summer school.. if they're half as good in writing as they are in speaking, should be a decent read...
Ma Ru

Scientists who rock - 3 views

www.amygdaloids.com

science neuroscience music fun

shared by Ma Ru on 14 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Ma Ru on 14 Jun 11
     
    I'll just leave this here... Found them through a recent publication of LeDoux in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
  • Ma Ru on 14 Jun 11
     
    Ah, and if there are no strong objections, from now on every brainstorming session shall commence with this: http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/10/ledoux-amygdaloids-brainstorm/2/
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