neurosciencestuff:

May 11, 2012

Regenerating sensory hair cells, which produce electrical signals in response to vibrations within the inner ear, could form the basis for treating age- or trauma-related hearing loss. One way to do this could be with gene therapy that drives new sensory hair cells to grow.

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did-you-kno:

Take a look at this image, You see embedded spirals of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spiralsare the same color.

The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding  colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:

The orange stripes go through the “green” spiral but not the “blue” one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color.

Source

jtotheizzoe:

Could a brain injury unlock an unknown talent? A look at the phenomenon of the “acquired savant”:

There’s Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There’s Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at 40, despite lacking any sort of musical training. There’s Alonzo Clemens, whose verbal and cognitive abilities stopped developing at the age of three due to a head injury but who can assemble incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in a matter of minutes. […]

It wasn’t until recently that scientists began figuring out what actually causes savant syndrome. In 2003, Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California-San Francisco, discovered that some patients with a degenerative brain disease gained incredible artistic abilities as their condition worsened. The disease is called frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and it primarily affects the front-left portions of the brain.

FTD’s limited pattern of degeneration is a crucial detail; patients who suffer from Alzheimer’s, for example — a disease that affects the entire brain — don’t generally show savant-like abilities. Why might savant syndrome be linked to a very specific kind of brain damage? One theory has it that since FTD leaves the rest of the brain alone, the unaffected regions step in to compensate for the loss of tissue, leading to what Treffert calls “the three Rs”: recruitment, rewiring, and release.

“What happens is that there is injury,” said Treffert. “There is then recruitment of still-intact cortical tissue. There is rewiring [of brain signals] through that intact tissue, and then there is the release of dormant potential within that brain area.” In other words, savants may be unlocking parts of the brain the rest of us simply don’t have access to.

Or do we?

It strains belief, but completely ordinary people are in fact capable of gaining savant-like skills for short periods of time. Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro, one researcher has managed to temporarily replicate the kind of brain “damage” seen among FTD patients in healthy humans:

A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ”What would you like to draw?” he said merrily. ”A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.”

[…]

Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.

In fairness, a few drawings don’t prove very much. But Allan Snyder — whom, Treffert confirms, has worked with Bruce Miller, the FTD scholar, before — is developing new, more objective ways of recording the changes the Medtronic causes in his subjects.

“He calls it the ‘thinking cap,’ ” Treffert joked.

The prospect of willfully inducing creativity conjures images of an augmented future, one where people carry around portable brain machines and give themselves a zap when circumstances demand an extra burst of intelligence. Maybe some people will choose to be permanently buzzed, at the cost of some verbal ability.

It sounds like science fiction. But the reality may be even more outlandish. Now that scientists understand how savant syndrome occurs, new research is turning to the underlying origins of the special abilities themselves. Most of it remains a mystery — a loose collection of questions more than anything resembling answers. For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato, who’d never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training? How is it that someone can suffer a stroke and wake up later only to discover that their English is tinged with a foreign accent?

Treffert thinks this could be the result of something called genetic memory.

“Some savants are very disabled,” said Treffert, “yet they know the rules of math, they know the rules of music, they know the rules of art. But they’ve never been taught that. Well, how can that get there? The only way it can get there is genetically.”

If Treffert’s hypothesis is true, it potentially upends a lot of what we know about genetics — not disproving it, necessarily, but vastly expanding the boundaries of what we think our DNA to be capable of. Could genes be more than a way to pass on physical traits? Could they, in fact, also be used to transmit knowledge from one generation to another? If so, what kind?

aminotes:

The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge. In the era of the Internet facts are not bricks but networks

Image: Library of Congress

“The digitization of 21st-century media, Weinberger argues, leads not to the creation of a “global village” but rather to a new understanding of whatknowledge is, to a change in the basic epistemology governing the universe. And this McLuhanesque transformation, in turn, reveals the general truth of theHeideggarian vision. Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free.

The causal force lying behind this massive sea change is, of course, the internet. Google search results — “9,560,000 results for ‘Heidegger’ in .71 seconds”) — taunt you with the realization that there are still another 950,000-odd pages of results to get through before you reach the end. The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks. (…)

The most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links. (…)

If our starting point is that all knowledge is networked, and always has been, then we are in a far better point to start talking about what makes today’s epistemological infastructure different from the infrastrucure in 1983. But we are also in a position to ask: if all knowledge was networked knowledge, even in 1983, than how did we not behave as if it was so? How did humanity carry on? Why did civilization not collapse into a morass of post-modern chaos? Weinberger’s answer is, once again, McLuhanesque. It was the medium in which knowledge was contained that created the difference. Stable borders around knowledge were built by books.

I would posit a different answer: if knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. Within philosophical subfield known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) this “acting-as-if-stability-existed” is referred to as “black boxing.” One of the black boxes around knowledge might very well be the book. But black boxes can also include algorithms, census bureaus, libraries, laboratories, and news rooms. Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. In other words, understanding changes to knowledge in this way leaves us far more sensitive to the operations of power than does the notoriously power-free perspective of Marshall McLuhan. (…)

Why don’t I care that the Google results page goes on towards infinity? If we avoid Marshall McLuhan’s easy answers to these complex questions, and retain the core of Heidegger’s brilliant insights while also adding a hefty dose of ontology to his largely immaterial philosophy, we might begin to understand the real operations of digital knowledge/power in a networked age.

Weinberger, however, does not care about power, and more or less admits this himself in a brilliant essay 2008 on the distinction between digital realists, utopians, and dystopians. Digital utopians, a group in which he includes himself, “point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities.” The realists, on the other hand, are rather dull: They argue that “the Web hasn’t had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium.” Politically speaking, digital utopianism tantalizes us with the promise of what might be, and pushes us to do better. The political problem with the realist position, Weinberger argues, is that it “is … [a] decision that leans toward supporting the status quo because what-is is more knowable than what might be.”

The realist position, however, is not necessarily a position of quietude. Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. Our job, as thinkers and teachers, is not to stand back and claim that the all bricks have crumbled. Rather, our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently.”

— C.W. Anderson, Ph.D, an assistant professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), researcher at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge, The Atlantic, Feb 3, 2012.

See also:

☞ David Weinberger, To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data, The Atlantic, Jan 3, 2012
☞ Rebecca J. Rosen, What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World, The Atlantic, Jan 5 2012.
☞ When science becomes civic: Connecting Engaged Universities and Learning Communities, University of California, Davis, September 11 - 12, 2001
☞ The Filter Bubble: Eli Pariser on What the Internet Is Hiding From You 
☞ A story about the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) (video)
☞ Vannevar Bush on the new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge (1945)