Will neuroscientists ever be able to read our minds?

 

Henri Le Sidaner (French, 1862–1939), Le quai vert, Bruges, c.1930s.

 

 

Neuroscientists have come far in improving our understanding of the human brain. But just how far can the science take us?

Neuroscience v rocket science: which is biggest and best?

Rainer Fetting (German, b. 1949), Pier to Manhattan, 1984

When people emphasise how complicated something is, they often compare it to either one or the other, but which one wins?

Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain

 

Several distinct neurons in a mouse retina that have been mapped by volunteers playing a game developed by Sebastian Seung. CreditPhoto illustration by Danny Jones. Original images from EyeWire.

By GARETH COOK, The New York Times, JAN. 8, 2015

In 2005, Sebastian Seung suffered the academic equivalent of an existential crisis. More than a decade earlier, with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard, Seung made a dramatic career switch into neuroscience, a gamble that seemed to be paying off. He had earned tenure from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a year faster than the norm and was immediately named a full professor, an unusual move that reflected the sense that Seung was something of a superstar. His lab was underwritten with generous funding by the elite Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was a popular teacher who traveled the world — Zurich; Seoul, South Korea; Palo Alto, Calif. — delivering lectures on his mathematical theories of how neurons might be wired together to form the engines of thought.

Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?

 

Credit Brandon Blommaert

By KENNETH D. MILLEROCT. 10, 2015

The New York Times

SOME hominid along the evolutionary path to humans was probably the first animal with the cognitive ability to understand that it would someday die. To be human is to cope with this knowledge. Many have been consoled by the religious promise of life beyond this world, but some have been seduced by the hope that they can escape death in this world. Such hopes, from Ponce de León’s quest to find a fountain of youth to the present voguefor cryogenic preservation, inevitably prove false.

Learning How Little We Know About the Brain

 

A double exposure of weakly electric fish with recordings of brain activity. Credit Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

By JAMES GORMAN, The New York Times, 10.11.2014

 

Research on the brain is surging. The United States and the European Union have launched new programs to better understand the brain. Scientists are mapping parts of mouse, fly and human brains at different levels of magnification. Technology for recording brain activity has been improving at a revolutionary pace.

The Brain’s Inner Language

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By JAMES GORMAN FEB. 24, 2014, The New York Times

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Clay Reid and colleagues are going deep into the mouse brain to decipher the conversations and decisions of neurons.

SEATTLE — When Clay Reid decided to leave his job as a professor at Harvard Medical School to become a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2012, some of his colleagues congratulated him warmly and understood right away why he was making the move.

Others shook their heads. He was, after all, leaving one of the world’s great universities to go to the academic equivalent of an Internet start-up, albeit an extremely well- financed, very ambitious one, created in 2003 by Paul Allen, a founder of Microsoft.

The Brain, in Exquisite Detail

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Mapping the Highways of the Brain

Deanna Barch and her colleagues are trying to map connections in the human brain. The study is part of The Human Connectome Project.

 

By JAMES GORMAN, The New York Times, JAN. 6, 2014

 

ST. LOUIS — Deanna Barch talks fast, as if she doesn’t want to waste any time getting to the task at hand, which is substantial. She is one of the researchers here at Washington University working on the first interactive wiring diagram of the living, working human brain.

To build this diagram she and her colleagues are doing brain scans and cognitive, psychological, physical and genetic assessments of 1,200 volunteers. They are more than a third of the way through collecting information. Then comes the processing of data, incorporating it into a three-dimensional, interactive map of the healthy human brain showing structure and function, with detail to one and a half cubic millimeters, or less than 0.0001 cubic inches.

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience / Viewing Where the Internet Goes

 

Erin Lubin/The New York Times

Kwabena Boahen holding a biologically inspired processor attached to a robotic arm in a laboratory at Stanford University.

By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, Published: December 28, 2013

It’s time to listen to the voices in your head

Voice-hearing is no longer seen merely as a psychiatric disorder, and could teach us a lot about how language operates in the brain

Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, was widely credited with prophecies inspired by Apollo. Detail from Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier

Charles Fernyhough and Eleanor Longden

Friday 8 November 2013 theguardian.com

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Hearing voices in your head when there’s no one around … that’s a sign of madness, right?

Brain research

 

The brain is the most complex and the most mysterious machine we know of.

Much more than an organ, it is a system whose secrets can help us not only cure diseases, but also build better computing systems, able to do things that today we may not even imagine. Powerful computers are needed to succeed in the brain research and new knowledge from simulating the brain will help up design the future computing technologies. Developments in one feed the other and need the other and vice versa.

Deep inside the brain

Michaelangelo’s painting of the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel: First identified by Meshberger in 1990. –

 

The brain controls our thinking, feelings and movements and a new exhibition in southern France aims to reveal some of its secrets.

European researchers are trying to unlock the brain’s deepest mysteries – and its amazing capacities.

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life

 

By TIM REQUARTH, The New York Times, March 18, 2013

For months, Henry Markram and his team had been feeding data into a supercomputer, four vending-machine-size black boxes whirring quietly in the basement of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.