Nice guy.  He was the kind of guy who always remembered your name and a detail about you from a previous conversation.  MIT obit

There was a segment titled “There’s No More Single Tasking”

Watch it here (archived):
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/the-lost-ability-to-do-one-task-at-a-time/525fff6b78c90a6d7e00020f

Miller Lab alumnus Melissa Warden wins NYSCF Robertson Neuroscience Award. Melissa is now a professor at Cornell.  Congrats, Melissa!

The New Yorker reviews Sue Corkin’s book about H.M., the famous neurological patient who could not form new memories.

Adam Gazzaley continues to ride his media wave by making music with the brain oscillations of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
NPR.org

Adam Gazzaley and company show, for the first time, that training on a video game results in benefits that transfer to other tests of cognition.  Training on the NeuroRacer game produced long-lasting improvements in cognitive abilities of older adults (age 65-80).  How did they do it?  Their trick was to focus on multitasking and attention.
Anguera et al (2013) Nature

The Atlantic: How To Rebuild An Attention Span

An article in MIT’s Technology Review magazine about our work on how multitasking “mixed selectivity” neurons may be key for cognition.
Do-It-All Neurons – A key to cognitive flexibility by Anne Trafton

Eyewitness testimony is shockingly unreliable.  How unreliable?  Ask Elizabeth Loftus.

Bursting the Neuro-Utopian Bubble
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/bursting-the-neuro-utopian-bubble/?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Where do you begin to correct this guy?
1. Neuroscience is ignoring and usurping the treatment of mental illness by the traditional methods of “talking and working with one another to the end of personal self-realization and social harmony”.
Umm, that doesn’t work very well.  So, this is a plus in my book.

2. The solution to curing disease is to erase all poverty?
Let’s assume that’s true (it’s not).  How do we do that?
This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch How To Do It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM

3. Freud?  Seriously?

That’s enough time wasted on this.

A review in Science of Sue Corkin’s book on the famous neuropsychology patient H.M., who could no longer form memories after his hippocampus was removed.

Permanent Present Tense The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. by Suzanne Corkin Basic Books, New York, 2013. 400 pp. $28.99, C$32. ISBN 9780465031597. Allen Lane, London. £20. ISBN 9781846142710.

A flurry of articles about Picower Institute’s Susumu Tonegawa’s paper implanting false memories in the mouse brain. They identified and tagged a memory engram for one environment, then activated that engram in a different environment while pairing it with shock.  Later, the animals showed fear in the first environment as if they were shocked there.
The Guardian
The New York Times
The cover of Science

The paper: Creating a false memory in the hippocampus

The journal Cortex will peer-review your experimental plan.  If accepted, they agree to publish your results, regardless of how they turn out.  But you must release your raw data so others can have at it.
Article in the Guardian

Dave Eagleman spells it out for us.

Discovery that some seizures arise in glial cells could offer new targets for epilepsy treatment.  MIT News Release

It was a good week for Miller Lab alumnus David J. Freedman (now a professor at University of Chicago).

Dave won the Distinguished Investigator Award in the Biological Sciences at The University of Chicago (http://www.freedmanlab.org/), was elected to the International Neuropsychological Symposium (INS History), and his band FuzZz had a CD release party.

When you’re hot, you’re hot.

 

DIY attempts at electrical brain stimulation to improve cognition are to get easier. Nature editorial.

Matt Chafee and crew show that monkeys under the influence of ketamine show similar deficits as human schizophrenia patients on a test of context processing.
Blackman et al 2013

It was recently reported that low-voltage, non-invasive brain stimulation improves mathematical abilities.  Does it?  Here’s a cautionary discussion:
Does Brain Stimulation Make You Better at Maths?

For years, neurophysiologists have observed that many neurons in higher-level cortex have “weird” properties.  They activate across a wide range of seemingly unrelated conditions and thus don’t  seem to fit into the traditional view of brain function in which each neuron has a single function or message.  They were often considered a “complicating nuisance” at best or dismissed at worst.  It turns out that these mixed selectivity neurons may be the most critical for complex behavior and cognition.   They greatly expand the brain’s computational power.

Read MIT press release: Complex brain function depends on flexibility

The paper:
Rigotti, M., Barak, O., Warden, M.R., Wang, X., Daw, N.D., Miller, E.K., & Fusi, S. (2013) The importance of mixed selectivity in complex cognitive tasks. Nature   View PDF  doi:10.1038/nature12160

In this week’s NY Times, Susana Martinez-Conde reminds us that our visual system works by detecting change.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/vision-is-all-about-change.html

The human prefrontal cortex may not be special in terms of its size relative to other primates, but it is still a pretty special.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/05/16/gorillas-agree-human-frontal-cortex-is-nothing-special/?utm_source=feedly

Want to know what it does?  Here’s a start:
Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. (2001) An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24:167-202.  Designated a Current Classic by Thomson Scientific as among the most cited papers in Neuroscience and Behavior. View PDF »

The title says it all.  Oscillations are useful for all sorts of things.
Synchrony in 32 metronomes

MIT neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin, author of the new book “Permanent Present Tense,” tells of her nearly five decades studying a man whose memory loss transformed science.

In the Boston Globe Sunday magazine

Miller Lab Research Scientist Vicky Puig quoted in a article in El Pais.  The Picower Institute at MIT is called  “one of the best neuroscience centers in the world”.  One of the?

In Spanish, but that’s why we have Google Translate.
http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/05/01/eps/1367419412_106866.html

Thousands attend memorial service for fallen campus officer.