Barry Fox Stimulating the tongue could help people with brain damage relearn how to ride a bike, or even to walk again, according to US company Wicab. Its patent application says injury or disease can upset the brain’s ability to balance the body, which hinders rehabilitation, but stimulating the tongue with mild electrical pulses provides the powerful stimulus needed to re-train the brain. Wicab has developed the technology to test the idea and has won a joint grant from the US government’s National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to prove it. A false palate with a square grid of 160 gold-plated electrodes is placed on the tongue and wirelessly connected to the output of a motion sensor and camera fitted on the patient’s head. The sensors deliver a coarse image of the scene ahead to the grid, which the tongue’s nerve cells send to the brain. Wicab’s say that with less than an hour’s training, the brain learns to correlate the input from the tongue with whatever other sensory signals it is getting from the eyes, inner ear and other parts of the body. As patients recover their balance they are weaned off the tongue-based assistance. The same system can be used to give blind people a coarse image of the outside world, without the need for eye implants. With only half an hour’s training a blind person can use tongue signals to catch a rolling ball, Wicab claims. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Keyword: Vision; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9281 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings. Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface. In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this. First the researchers identified the neural signals rats generate when they have found a scent that they are looking for. “When a dog is sniffing a bomb, he makes a unique movement that the handler recognises,” says John Chapin, a neuroscientist at the State University of New York in Brooklyn who is collaborating on the project. “Instead of the rat making a conditioned response, we pick up the response immediately from the brain.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 6142 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sharon Weinberger U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer's prefrontal cortex to warn of furtive threats detected by the soldier's subconscious. In a new effort dubbed "Luke's Binoculars" -- after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon's R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different -- Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years. The agency claims no scientific breakthrough is needed on the project -- formally called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. Instead, Darpa hopes to integrate technologies that have been simmering in laboratories for years, ranging from flat-field, wide-angle optics, to the use of advanced electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to rapidly recognize brainwave signatures. © 2007 CondéNet Inc. All rights reserved

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 10246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Noah Shachtman The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa push to radically boost the performance of American troops. "Computers today, you have to learn how they work," says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. "We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you." So much of what's done today in the military involves staring at a computer screen -- parsing an intelligence report, keeping track of fellow soldiers, flying a drone airplane -- that it can quickly lead to information overload. Schmorrow and other Augmented Cognition (AugCog) researchers think they can overcome this, though. The idea -- to grossly over-simplify -- is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. © 2007 CondéNet Inc

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 10121 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound. Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself. One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise. DARPA is also pursuing an approach first developed at NASA's Ames lab, which involves placing electrodes called electromyographic sensors on the neck, to detect changes in impedance during speech. A neural network processes the data and identifies the pattern of words. The sensor can even detect subvocal or silent speech. The speech pattern is sent to a computerised voice generator that recreates the speaker's words. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Keyword: Language
Link ID: 7159 - Posted: 06.24.2010