Biological Psychology Links

by Paul Marks How do you give a robot a sharper sense of smell? By using genetically modified frog cells, according to Shoji Takeuchi, a bioengineer at the University of Tokyo in Japan. Today's electronic noses are not up to the job, he says. Although e-noses have been around for a while – and are used to sniff out rotten food in production lines – they lack accuracy. That's because e-noses use quartz rods designed to vibrate at a different frequency when they bind to a target substance. But this is not a foolproof system, as subtly different substances with similar molecular weights may bind to the rod, producing a false positive. Instead, Takeuchi believes there is nothing quite as good as biology for distinguishing between different biomolecules, such as disease markers in our breath. So he and his team have developed a living smell sensor. First, immature eggs, or oocytes, from the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis were genetically modified to express the proteins known to act as smell receptors. He chose X. laevis cells as they are widely studied and their protein expression mechanism is well understood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson In the ever-expanding world of medical devices, early adopters have a new option: a robotic arm. A Cambridge start-up, Myomo Inc., is making an expensive stroke therapy available directly to patients, an effort to encourage use of the novel device. The Myomo arm, based on technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is in many ways a natural extension of research that has shown repetitive-exercise therapy can help stroke patients regain movement. The lightweight prosthesis straps onto the arm and reads signals from the muscles to give a patient an assist when he or she moves the limb. But there is no rigorous scientific evidence demonstrating how well it works. And the $7,000 device casts a spotlight on the hard-to-navigate world of rehabilitation devices — in which patients who are often desperate face a growing number of products whose effectiveness is still being determined. “While there’s some suggestive, tiny studies — that are really pilot studies — that it might be useful, there’s no proof of efficacy using the usual criteria,’’ said Dr. Joel Stein, chairman of the rehabilitation and regenerative medicine department at Columbia University. He is also on Myomo’s scientific advisory board. “I’ve worked with many stroke patients through the years, and I’m careful to not be too paternalistic deciding for them. . . . They feel like the medical system has given up on them, and there’s a fine line between not over-promising and saying we have nothing shown to be helpful, therefore you should just give up.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS About four years ago, John Donoghue’s son, Jacob, then 18, took his father aside and declared, “Dad, I now understand what you do — you’re ‘The Matrix’!” Dr. Donoghue, 61, is a professor of engineering and neuroscience at Brown University, studying how human brain signals could combine with modern electronics to help paralyzed people gain greater control over their environments. He’s designed a machine, the BrainGate, that uses thought to move objects. We spoke for two hours in his Brown University offices in Providence, R.I., and then again by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows: Q. WHAT EXACTLY IS BRAINGATE? A. It’s a way for people who’ve been paralyzed by strokes, spinal cord injuries or A.L.S. to connect their brains to the outside world. The system uses a tiny sensor that’s been implanted into the part of a person’s brain that generates movement commands. This sensor picks up brain signals, transmits them to a plug attached to the person’s scalp. The signals then go to a computer which is programmed to translate them into simple actions. Q. WHY MOVE THE SIGNALS OUT OF THE BODY? A. Because for many paralyzed people, there’s been a break between their brain and the rest of their nervous system. Their brains may be fully functional, but their thoughts don’t go anywhere. What BrainGate does is bypass the broken connection. Free of the body, the signal is directed to machines that will turn thoughts into action. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

by Laurie Rich, Jane Bosveld, Andrew Grant, Amy Barth The brain is a castle on a hill. Encased in bone and protected by a special layer of cells, it is shielded from infections and injuries—but also from many pharmaceuticals and even from the body’s own immune defenses. As a result, brain problems are tough to diagnose and to treat. To meet this challenge, researchers are exploring unconventional therapies, from electrodes to laser-light stimulation to mind-bending drugs. Some of these radical experiments may never pan out. But, as frequently happens in medicine, a few of today’s improbable approaches may evolve into tomorrow’s miraculous cures. 1. Man Meets Machine In a sense, cyborgs already walk among us: Nearly 200,000 deaf or near-deaf people have cochlear implants, electronic sound-processing machines that stimulate the auditory nerve and link into the brain. But even by the fanciful science fiction definition, the age of cyborgs is just around the corner. In the last decade, researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and interpreting brain signals. Technologies that allow people to use their thoughts to control machines—computers, speaking devices, or prosthetic limbs—are already being tested and could soon be available for widespread applications.

Atlanta —Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, U.S. and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings, “the semi-living artist” – a picture-drawing robot in Perth, Australia whose movements are controlled by the brain signals of cultured rat cells in Atlanta. Gripping three colored markers positioned above a white canvas, the robotic drawing arm operates based on the neural activity of a few thousand rat neurons placed in a special petri dish that keeps the cells alive. The dish, a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA), is instrumented with 60 two-way electrodes for communication between the neurons and external electronics. The neural signals are recorded and sent to a computer that translates neural activity into robotic movement. ©2003 Georgia Institute of Technology

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan. It was the first time that brain signals had been used to make a robot walk, said Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University whose laboratory designed and carried out the experiment. In 2003, Dr. Nicolelis’s team proved that monkeys could use their thoughts alone to control a robotic arm for reaching and grasping. These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs. “When that person thinks about walking,” he said, “walking happens.” Richard A. Andersen, an expert on such systems at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who was not involved in the experiment, said that it was “an important advance to achieve locomotion with a brain machine interface.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Genetically engineered fruit flies have been made to jump, beat their wings and fly on human command, according to a new study published in the journal Cell. The flies are the first creatures that humans have remotely controlled. Someday, a related nerve stimulation process may restore nerve circuits in people with neurological diseases or injuries, such as the spinal cord trauma of the late actor and activist Christopher Reeve. Manipulation of behavior in insects and animals, even humans, has been possible for the past 50 years or so. Most of the studies, however, involved invasive electrical stimulation of specific parts of the brain. Surgeon Wilder Penfield, for example, electrically stimulated the cortexes of neurosurgery patients, who later said that the electricity affected their thinking and memory. Monkeys undergoing brain stimulation also have been tricked into thinking that something was vibrating their hands. "Attempts to manipulate behavior in an active and predictive way have been a focus of the laboratory for several years," explained Gero Miesenböck, who co-authored the Cell paper with Susana Lima, and is an associate professor of cell biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

A light-sensitive material developed in space could be used to restore the sight of people with damaged retinas. According to Alex Ignatiev, director of the Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center (SVEC) at the University of Houston, US, tests show that the ceramic photodetector will be compatible with the human eye, unlike earlier prototypes that were based on silicon. Human trials of the device are set to begin later this year. Rod and cone cells in the retina of the human eye send electrical signals to the brain when they detect light. Certain diseases damage these cells and cause blindness, but do not affect the ‘wiring’ – which means that sight could be restored by implanting suitable artificial cells. Now a photodetector developed at SVEC, which is sponsored by NASA, could fit the bill. The device consists of a thin film of lanthanum-doped lead zirconium titanate (PLZT). The material is grown layer by layer – or ‘epitaxially’ – using a process perfected during research under ultra-high-vacuum conditions in the Wake Shield Facility, a small space-based laboratory launched by the space shuttle into low-Earth orbit. The method produces a uniform crystal structure with optimum optical properties. Copyright © IOP Publishing Ltd 1996-2002. All rights reserved.

By RONI CARYN RABIN Children with the surgically implanted hearing aids called cochlear implants rate their quality of life as highly as children with normal hearing, according to one of the first studies that looked at children as well as their parents. The findings are important, the researchers said, because deaf children often feel socially isolated, have trouble making friends and tend to have low self-esteem as a result. The lead author, Betty A. Loy, said the information would be useful to parents making decisions about cochlear implants for their babies. “They want to know: ‘Is my kid going to be made fun of? Is my kid going to be bullied? How is my kid going to feel about themselves with this apparatus on their head?’ ” said Dr. Loy, of the Dallas Cochlear Implant Program. The researchers asked 84 children with cochlear implants how they felt about themselves, their family lives, their friends and school. Parents were questioned separately, and the responses were compared with those of a control group of 1,501 children the same ages, 8 to 16, with normal hearing. The paper appears in the Feb. 1 issue of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. Though the overall quality-of-life scores were very similar to those of the control group, the younger children appeared to be happier than the adolescents but scored their family lives lower than did children with normal hearing. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Bionic limb replacements that look and work exactly like the real thing will likely remain a Hollywood fantasy, but fast advances in human-to-machine communication and miniaturization could bring the technology close within a decade. That is the outlook of Rutgers biomedical engineer and inventor William Craelius, whose Dextra artificial hand is the first to let a person use existing nerve pathways to control individual computer-driven mechanical fingers. Craelius published an overview of bionics entitled "The Bionic Man - Restoring Mobility," in the international journal "Science," on Feb. 8.

Promise and peril in a marriage of brains and silicon By Nell Boyce Except for those odd little backpacks, the rats seem no creepier than usual. They climb trees, run through pipes, and scamper across tables. But they aren't following the usual rodent urges. These rats are moving under remote control, reacting to commands radioed to three thin electrodes in their brains. The signals tell them which way to turn–and encourage them by delivering electrical jolts to their pleasure centers. It is a tour de force with unsettling implications, and not just for rats. "It was kind of amazing to see," says researcher Sanjiv Talwar of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn. "We didn't imagine that it would be that accurate." The success, reported last week in Nature, conjures up visions of roborat search-and-rescue squads. It may also advance a long-sought goal in humans: linking the brains of people paralyzed by disease or injury to robots that could act for them. To be really useful, such devices would have to give sensory feedback to the brains of their users. That's what Talwar and his colleagues achieved with the rats, steering them left or right with impulses that made them feel as if someone were touching their whiskers. The feat is just the latest in a series of demonstrations suggesting that brains could meld with machines faster than you might think. Monkeys have moved robot arms with signals from their brains. Neural implants have also given a few severely disabled patients control over a computer cursor and delivered "sound" right to the brains of some deaf people. Yet it isn't just the paranoid who worry that such technologies could be used for brain enhancement rather than therapy, or that the mating of mind and machine could turn people into something akin to roborats. © 2002 U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights reserved.

Some 200,000 people live with partial or nearly total permanent paralysis in the United States, with spinal cord injuries adding 11,000 new cases each year. Most research aimed at recovering motor function has focused on repairing damaged nerve fibers, which has succeeded in restoring limited movement in animal experiments. But regenerating nerves and restoring complex motor behavior in humans are far more difficult, prompting researchers to explore alternatives to spinal cord rehabilitation. One promising approach involves circumventing neuronal damage by establishing connections between healthy areas of the brain and virtual devices, called brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), programmed to transform neural impulses into signals that can control a robotic device. While experiments have shown that animals using these artificial actuators can learn to adjust their brain activity to move robot arms, many issues remain unresolved, including what type of brain signal would provide the most appropriate inputs to program these machines. Link: http://www.plos.org/downloads/plbi-01-02-carmena.pdf

By Malcolm Ritter ALBANY, N.Y. – To somebody peeking into this little room, I'm just a middle-aged guy wearing a polka-dotted blue shower cap with a bundle of wires sticking out the top, relaxing in a recliner while staring at a computer screen. But in my mind's eye, I'm a teenager sitting bolt upright on the black piano bench of my boyhood home, expertly pounding out the stirring opening chords of Chopin's Military Polonaise. Not that I've ever actually played that well. But there's a little red box motoring across that computer screen, and I'm hoping my fantasy will change my brain waves just enough to make it rise and hit a target. Some people have learned to hit such targets better than 90 percent of the time. During this, my first of 12 training sessions, I succeed 58 percent of the time. But my targets are so big that I could have reached 50 percent by random chance alone. Bottom line: Over the past half-hour, I've displayed just a bit more mental prowess than you'd expect from a bowl of Froot Loops. © Copyright 2005 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

A silicon chip that faithfully mimics the neural circuitry of a real retina could lead to better bionic eyes for those with vision loss, researchers claim. About 700,000 people in the developed world are diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration each year, and 1.5 million people worldwide suffer from a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. In both of these diseases, retinal cells, which convert light into nerve impulses at the back of the eye, gradually die. Most artificial retinas connect an external camera to an implant behind the eye via a computer (see 'Bionic' eye may help reverse blindness). The new silicon chip created by Kareem Zaghloul at the University of Pennsylvania, US, and colleague Kwabena Boahen at Stanford University, also in the US, could remove the need for a camera and external computer altogether. The circuit was built with the mammalian retina as its blueprint. The chip contains light sensors and circuitry that functions in much the same way as nerves in a real retina – they automatically filter the mass of visual data collected by the eye to leave only what the brain uses to build a picture of the world. "It has potential as a neuroprosthetic that can be fully implanted," Zaghloul told New Scientist. The chip could be embedded directly into the eye and connected to the nerves that carry signals to the brain's visual cortex. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Aria Pearson People who have lost their sense of balance could one day be fitted with an inner ear implant modelled on the body’s own balance organs, say researchers. Current designs are successful in animals, but two new studies promise a smaller, more accurate device, with a longer battery life – the crucial prerequisites for use in humans. The sense of balance is controlled by the vestibular portion of the inner ear. It keeps track of the motion and position of the head using three fluid-filled hoops, called semicircular canals. These sit at perpendicular angles to each other. When the head rotates quickly in a certain direction, the fluid in the corresponding hoop pushes against a membrane, bending hair cells that trigger a nerve. The nerve sends the information to the brain which tells the eyes to adjust. “It’s the fastest reflex in the body,” says Charles Santina at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who is designing an implant to restore this phenomenon, called the vestibular-ocular reflex, in humans. “Without it, the world looks like you’re watching it through a hand-held video camera,” he explains. People lose this reflex when the vestibular hair cells die, usually from genetic disorders, infections or antibiotic poisoning. Hearing loss can also be caused by hair cell death, and since cochlear implants have been successful at restoring partial hearing (see Implant works wonders for deaf babies), scientists reasoned a similar implant could work for balance. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Anna Gosline Implants buried deep inside the brain may provide the best hope yet for vision-restoring bionic eyes. Most visual prosthetics rely on implants behind the retina. These stimulate surrounding nerve tissue to generate points of light, called phosphenes, in the mind's eye. Such prosthetics require a detailed map of where phosphenes appear in response to electrical stimulation. Once this map is complete, digital images, captured by a camera, can be converted to electrical pulses that produce multiple points of light, allowing a blind person to "see" simple shapes. In patients with severe eye trauma, however, there may not be enough surviving retinal neurons to stimulate. Or a patient's retinas may simply have degenerated over time. An alternative is to place implants directly in the brain, within the visual cortex. But this is a large and complexly folded part of the brain, making access and mapping of the visual field a serious challenge. Now John Pezaris and colleague R. Clay Reid, both at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, have shown that phosphenes can be produced by stimulating the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) – an area deep in the centre of the brain that relays visual signals from the retina to the cortex. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

David Robson A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. Researchers say this means future robots must be susceptible to the same tricks as humans are in order to see as well as us. For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. An object may appear brighter or darker, either because of the shade of its colour, or because it is in bright light or shadows. The brain learns how to tackle this through trial and error when we are babies, the theory goes. Mostly it gets it right, but occasionally a scene contradicts our previous experiences. The brain gets it wrong and we perceive an object lighter or darker than it really is – creating an illusion. Subtle similaritiesUntil now there has been no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. Beau Lotto and David Corney at University College London, UK, think they have finally done it. They created a program that learns to predict the lightness of an image based on its past experiences – just like a baby. And just like a human, it falls prey to optical illusions. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By Nikhil Swaminathan When Deb Roy and his wife have guests over to see their two-and-a-half-year-old son—the couple is withholding his name to protect his privacy—the first thing they do is ask their visitors to fill out a consent form. Unusual, for sure, but the couple is merely trying to make people aware that their actions and voices may be captured by the 11 fish-eye cameras and 14 microphones hidden around their Cambridge, Mass., home listening in on nearly every sound their son has ever uttered. The short-term goal is to understand how children acquire language; the long-term goal is to use the intelligence gleaned to teach robots to talk, too. Roy, 39, head of the cognitive machines group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is documenting every parent–child "conversation" in what he calls the Human Speechome Project. He estimates that by the time he finishes the recording phase of the project later this year, he will have collected an estimated 200,000 hours of video and multitrack audio data—or about 70 percent of the child's first two years of waking life, along with part of year three. Roy initiated the project after hitting a dead-end in his robotics research. As a graduate student at M.I.T.'s Media Lab, he wanted to teach a robot to talk, so he programmed one of his creations (named Toco) with sophisticated image and speech processing software combined with machine-learning algorithms that he hoped would do the trick. But when Roy placed a ball in front of Toco's camera, he realized the machine could not fathom the difference between the meaning of "ball" (the object) and "round" (the object's property), both of which were represented the same way in its computer memory. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Celeste Biever A virtual child controlled by artificially intelligent software has passed a cognitive test regarded as a major milestone in human development. It could lead to smarter computer games able to predict human players' state of mind. Children typically master the "false belief test" at age 4 or 5. It tests their ability to realise that the beliefs of others can differ from their own, and from reality. The creators of the new character – which they called Eddie – say passing the test shows it can reason about the beliefs of others, using a rudimentary "theory of mind". "Today's [video game] characters have no genuine autonomy or mental picture of who you are," researcher Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, told New Scientist. He aims to change that with future games and virtual worlds populated by genuinely intelligent computer characters able to predict and understand players actions and motives. Bringsjord's colleague Andrew Shilliday adds that their work will have applications outside of gaming. For example, search engines able to reason about the beliefs of a user might allow them to better understand their search queries. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Ewen Callaway Look Mum, no hands! Two monkeys have managed to use brain power to control a robotic arm to feed themselves. The feat marks the first time a brain-controlled prosthetic limb has been wielded to perform a practical task. Previous demonstrations in monkeys and humans have tapped into the brain to control computer cursors and virtual worlds, and even to clench a robot hand. But complicated physical activities like eating are "a completely different ball game", says Andrew Schwarz, a neurological engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the new research. Tests with humans are being prepared in numerous labs, but experts caution that brain-controlled robotic limbs are far from freeing paraplegics from their wheelchairs or giving amputees their limbs back. Wired for actionMost people who become paralysed or lose limbs retain the mental dexterity to perform physical actions. And by tapping into a region of the brain responsible for movement – the motor cortex – researchers can decode a person's intentions and translate them into action with a prosthetic. This had been done mostly with monkeys and in virtual worlds or with simple movements, such as reaching out a hand. But two years ago, an American team hacked into the brain of a patient with no control over his arms to direct a computer cursor and a simple robotic arm. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

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