‘Speed of Thought’ Guides Brain Memory Consolidation

UA researchers find that the brain processes memories six to seven times faster than real time.

By Jeff Harrison, University Communications
November 15, 2007

Scientists at The University of Arizona have added another piece of the puzzle of how the brain processes memory.

Bruce McNaughton, a professor of psychology and physiology, and his colleague David Euston have shown that, during sleep, the reactivated memories of real-time experiences are processed within the brain at a higher rate of speed. That rate can be as much as six or seven times faster, and what McNaughton calls “thought speed.”

Their results are published in the Nov. 16 issue of the journal Science.

Memory stores patterns of activity in modular form in the brain’s cortex. Different modules in the cortex process different kinds of information – sounds, sights, tastes, smells, etc. The cortex sends these networks of activity to a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus then creates and assigns a tag, a kind of temporary bar code, that is unique to every memory and sends that signal back to the cortex.

Each module in the cortex uses the tag to retrieve its own part of the activity. A memory of having lunch, for example, would involve a number of modules, each of which might record where the diner sat, what was served, the noise level in the restaurant or the financial transaction to pay for the meal.

But while an actual dining experience might have taken up an hour of actual time, replaying the memory of it would only take 8 to 10 minutes. The reason, McNaughton said, is that the speed of the consolidation process isn’t constrained by the real world physical laws that regulate activity in time and space. more>>>

Online retailer Amazon has unveiled an own-brand wireless electronic book reader called Kindle.

The paperback-sized device is on sale immediately in the US for $399 (£195). It can store up to 200 books in its onboard memory.

Kindle does not need a PC to be loaded with books, blogs or papers – instead content arrives via wireless.

Amazon said 90,000 books, including bestsellers priced at $9.99, were available for Kindle at launch.

New addition

“We’ve been working on Kindle for more than three years,” said Amazon boss Jeff Bezos in a statement.

“Our top design objective was for Kindle to disappear in your hands — to get out of the way — so you can enjoy your reading,” he said.

Content is delivered to the device via the EVDO wireless network – this could limit the gadget’s overseas appeal as the technology is not widely used outside North America. more>>>

The near-human performance of a virtual teacher called Eve created by Massey researchers has drawn the attention of scientists across the computing world.

Eve is what is known in the information sciences as an intelligent or affective tutoring system that can adapt its response to the emotional state of people by interaction through a computer system.

The system “Easy with Eve” is thought to be the first of its type.

The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, tell the story of creating Eve and the teaching system in the latest issue of the leading international journal on information sciences, Elsevier.

Because one-to-one teaching is known to be the most effective teaching method, Dr Sarrafzadeh says the researchers wanted to create a virtual teacher that could pick up body language and facial expressions – like a real teacher – to interact and to ensure they are holding the attention of students. more>>>

And watch the video HERE.

From New Scientist:

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It produces our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world. This jelly-like mass of tissue, weighing in at around 1.4 kilograms, contains a staggering one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons.

The complexity of the connectivity between these cells is mind-boggling. Each neuron can make contact with thousands or even tens of thousands of others, via tiny structures called synapses. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. The pattern and strength of the connections is constantly changing and no two brains are alike.

It is in these changing connections that memories are stored, habits learned and personalities shaped, by reinforcing certain patterns of brain activity, and losing others. more>>>

There are only twelve notes in western music, and only 36 dramatic situations total. There are millions of songs and films and books and all they can do is rehash, reshape, and reuse. Stylistic gimmicks like the motion capture animation in Beowolf don’t change the fact that they are just retelling a 1,000 year old story. The old society is decaying from lack of new material.

But think about it, the old regurgitated song and dance is the basis upon which NEW technologies are created. Societies of old created the basics, which we rehash today but out of economic necessity CREATE in the process. It is the need for NEW that leads us toward an amazing future where an incredible amount of growth can take place, a.k.a. the Singularity.

For a really good blog article about the art and technology used in Beowolf please visit Ain’t It Cool.com.

It would have to be Europe to come up with this idea. Us in the US believe we’ll never die!

The seed vaults are at the end of a 120-metre long tunnel

From BBC News:

Engineers have begun the two-month process of cooling down a “doomsday vault”, which will house seeds from all known varieties of key food crops.

The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.

Built deep inside a mountain, it aims to safeguard the world’s crops from future disasters, such as nuclear wars, asteroids or dangerous climate change.

The first seeds are scheduled to arrive at the Arctic site in mid-February.

The Norwegian government is paying the $9m (£4.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house 4.5 million seed samples. more>>>

Does the moon belong to anyone? Does the Earth? It’s funny that our adherence to the idea of private property is based on nothing more than the fact that we all adhere to the delusion that something can be owned.

From Space.com:

By Simon Saradzhyan

posted: 14 November 2007
03:40 pm ET

MOSCOW – India and Russia have signed a lunar exploration agreement calling on the countries to jointly develop a robotic orbiter and lander that would launch together in 2013.

The accord was signed Monday in Moscow by Anatoly Perminov, director of the Russian Space Agency, or Roskosmos, and Gopalan Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

“This is a very interesting project,” Perminov said in a press release posted Nov. 12 on the Roskosmos Web site. “Russia and India will be developing a spacecraft jointly.”

According to an ISRO statement released today, the new moon lander will be dubbed Chandrayaan-2. India’s first lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, is slated to launch in April 2008, ISRO officials said.

The lunar lander would include a research laboratory and a rover, according to the Roskosmos press release. Both the lander and orbiter would be integrated as a single payload to be launched by India’s Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle, the press release said. more>>>

If war is important to people, it should be fought by people.

From TechBlog:

You can get your kids one for christmas this year!

From Time:

The first thing Jose Halloy wants you to know is that he will not help you get rid of the cockroaches in your apartment. It’s true that he and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels and several other European institutions have created a set of tiny robotic Pied Pipers that can trick roaches into following them — even to places where a sensible roach would never venture. But the research they’ve just described in Science has to do not with extermination strategy but with understanding how roaches make decisions. “When you observe cockroaches,” says Halloy, “you see that they act as a group; they tend to stay together. So how do they do that? Is there a leader? What kind of information do they use? How do they share it?” more>>>

From BBC News:

Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time.

In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.

“We hope it will be a breakthrough,” says Joe Wright of Neural Signals, which has helped develop the technology.

“Conversation is what we’re hoping for, but we’re pretty far from that.”

Reading minds

Experts in the field of neuroscience agreed it was an exciting advance.

“It hasn’t come completely out of the blue,” said Professor Geraint Rees, a neuroscientist at University College London.

“We have been moving towards decoding primitive vocabulary for a while now. But this is certainly an interesting development, although invasive techniques, where something is out in someone’s brain, such as these will of course carry risks.” more>>>

From New Scientist:

Computers might not be clever enough to trick adults into thinking they are intelligent yet, but a new study shows that a giggling robot is sophisticated enough to get toddlers to treat it as a peer.

An experiment led by Javier Movellan at the University of California San Diego, US, is the first long-term study of interaction between toddlers and robots.

The researchers stationed a 2-foot-tall robot called QRIO (pronounced “curio”), and developed by Sony, in a classroom of a dozen toddlers aged between 18 months and two years.

QRIO stayed in the middle of the room using its sensors to avoid bumping the kids or the walls. It was initially programmed to giggle when the kids touched its head, to occasionally sit down, and to lie down when its batteries died. A human operator could also make the robot turn its gaze towards a child or wave as they went away. “We expected that after a few hours, the magic was going to fade,” Movellan says. “That’s what has been found with earlier robots.” But, in fact, the kids warmed to the robot over several weeks, eventually interacting with QRIO in much the same way they did with other toddlers.

From ENN:

The average price for all types of gasoline is holding steady around $2_95 per gallon nationwide, but the pain at the pump might be short-lived as research from the University of Houston may eliminate one of the biggest hurdles to the wide-scale production of fuel cell-powered vehicles.

Peter Strasser, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, led the research team in discovering a method to make a fuel cell more efficient and less expensive. The initiative is one of four ongoing fuel cell projects in development at the Cullen College of Engineering at UH.

A fuel cell converts chemically stored energy directly into electricity and is already two to three times more efficient in converting fuel to power than the internal combustion engine usually found in automobiles.

“A fuel cell is a power generation device that converts energy into electricity with very high efficiencies without combustion, flame, noise or vibration,” Strasser said. “If a fuel cell is run on hydrogen and air, as planned for automotive fuel cells, hydrogen and oxygen molecules combine to provide electricity with water as the only byproduct.” more>>>

From Physorg:

Babies driving robots. It sounds like the theme of a cartoon series but it is actually the focus of important and innovative research being conducted at the University of Delaware that could have significant repercussions for the cognitive development of infants with special needs.

Two UD researchers – James C. (Cole) Galloway, associate professor of physical therapy, and Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering – have outfitted kid-size robots to provide mobility to children who are unable to fully explore the world on their own.

The work is important because much of infant development, both of the brain and behavior, emerges from the thousands of experiences each day that arise as babies independently move and explore their world. This is the concept of “embodied development,” Galloway said.

Infants with Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism and other disorders can have mobility limitations that disconnect them from the ongoing exploration that their peers enjoy. more>>>

From Gizmodo:

There have been pen phone concepts before, even a few working products, but none as slim and small as this one sent us by an anonymous tipster. He told us this “design A” is not a finished product yet, and added that the undisclosed company he’s working for wants to gauge interest in such a device. While most users will connect the phone to Bluetooth earpieces, those two target-shaped areas on the top and bottom are earpiece and receiver. So far, so good.