Tales from the bits

From Physorg.com:  A study on mice showed that  even a few days of running or jogging stimulates the brain to grow new cells in a part of the brain involved in memory and recall. The study was done by neuroscientists from University of Cambridge in the UK and the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore in the US. [...]

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the brain, to explore how it functions and to serve as a tool for neuroscientists and medical researchers. The project is hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique’s Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne. Professor Henry Markam is the project director. He has announced that his team will [...]

From New York Times: Research shows that longheld views have been prove wrong. For example it is not correct that 40 percent of brain cells are lost when the brain ages. Adults retain the ability to learn. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If [...]

Dr. Cristopher James from the University of Southampton achieved for the first time Brain-to-brain communication. For his experiment one person using Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) transmitted thoughts, as a series of binary digits, over the internet to another person. The second person was attached also to an EEG. The PC would pick up the stream of binary [...]

Brain computer interface (BCI) can provide a way to help many people suffering from serious illnesses or injuries. In my previous post I mentioned some of the potential dangers of using BCI to monitor brain activity and reveal thoughts. This post adds to the positive aspect of BCI. It is a video from Stanford’s Neural [...]

Brain is one of the last frontiers standing. Only recently scientists have the technology to begin recording and documenting brain activity accurately. Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is a field that has great to offer in mankind if treated with caution. In my opinion there are many implications involving the ability to “read” and interpret brainwaves. [...]

From Wired News by Priya Ganapati. The first step towards a revolution on how humans interact with computers has started with the multitouch displays. Multitouch displays are screens that are sensitive to the pressure of more than one finger. The future of human-computer interfaces may involve using neurotransmitters to help translate thoughts into computing actions, [...]

Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning. The transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), in which an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull, uses a nine-volt battery which delivers a [...]

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) could someday help people with severe paralysis move their limbs, walk, and use a computer. A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device. (Wikipedia,2008) Paralysis is caused [...]

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. The new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”, analyzes new studies which provide evidence that the aging brain [...]