Clinging to the idea that the mind is more than just the brain, Mr. Dennett said, is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific.”
Yep.
Great people doing great science.
NY Times April 29, 2013 TRONDHEIM, Norway — In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained to him why they had to study with him….
Read it here:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/science/may-britt-and-edvard-moser-explore-the-brains-gps.html?hp
The response is here:
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=64951
I’ll make one comment::
Propper refers to criticisms of “rigid focus on p values” to justify calling effects “trends” or even “strong trends” when their p values are not significant. Nonsense! Statistics keep us honest. They are objective tests that prevent us from accepting or supporting hypotheses simply because we like that hypothesis. How often do you see authors calling non-significant effects “trends” when they don’t support the author’s conclusion?
An easy-to-use EEG cap could expand the number of ways to interact with your mobile devices. It reads brainwaves (correlated brain rhythms) using a dry EEG cap.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513861/samsung-demos-a-tablet-controlled-by-your-brain/
NY Times Blog: Disruptions: Brain Computer Interfaces Inch Closer to Mainstream
Jeanne et al. show that changes in correlation between neurons enhances learning. It improves neural discrimination by enhancing noise suppression.
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(13)00181-5
Preview by Frédéric E. Theunissen, Julie E. Elie:
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(13)00314-0
“Within the walls of the university, the professors come and go as they choose, occasionally teaching, but most often indifferent to the students. Professors with abilities of value to commerce, navigation arts, or in compounding medicinals, seat themselves in the comforts of the university, but devote their time and skill to personal gain. Their rapacity is exceeded only by their hatred for each other and disdain for the citizenry. Upon being called to attend to their established duties, they bitterly complain of intrusions on their freedom. In the universities, it is a woeful situation.”
Gianfredo Capitolano, Rector of Bensilatano University, quoted in 1435. He was killed in 1437 by a deranged doctoral candidate.
(Sorry for the repost. This still makes me chuckle.)
Jon Simons and The Neurocritic tear apart a study claiming to show that unilateral fist clenching can improve memory encoding or recall.
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=64951
http://neurocritic.blogspot.dk/2013/04/want-to-remember-something-clenching.html
Van Pelt and Fries show that the peak frequency of gamma-band decreases with stimulus eccentricity and that stationary and moving stimuli are similarly modulated. These results argue that gamma is related to stimulus salience and are consistent with recent observations of increased gamma vs beta synchrony for bottom-up vs top-down attention in the frontoparietal cortical network (Buschman and Miller (2007).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191300387X
For further reading:
Buschman, T.J. and Miller, E.K. (2007) Top-down versus bottom-up control of attention in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices. Science. 315: 1860-1862 The Scientist’s “Hot Paper” for October 2009. View PDF »
In the review, Xiao-Jing Wang deconstructs the cellular and circuit mechanisms involved in sustained “working memory” activity. Among other things, Wang shows that these circuits do not merely latch onto a sensory input, the same circuits are involved in decision-making computations.
http://wang.medicine.yale.edu/pdf_pub/wang.pfc-book-chapter2012.pdf
Related Miller Lab work cited by Wang:
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 »
Fusi, S., Asaad, W.F., Miller, E.K., and Wang, X.J. (2007) A neural circuit model of flexible sensori-motor mapping: Learning and forgetting on multiple timescales. Neuron. 54: 319-333. View PDF »
Asaad, W.F., Rainer, G. and Miller, E.K. (1998) Neural activity in the primate prefrontal cortex during associative learning. Neuron, 21:1399-1407. View PDF »
Wallis, J.D., Anderson, K.C., and Miller, E.K. (2001) Single neurons in the prefrontal cortex encode abstract rules. Nature, 411:953-956. View PDF »
Miller, E.K., Erickson, C.A., and Desimone, R. (1996) Neural mechanisms of visual working memory in prefrontal cortex of the macaque. Journal of Neuroscience. 16:5154-5167. View PDF »
In this paper, Miller Lab alumnus Andreas Nieder tested neurons in the prefrontal cortex while animals switched between performing “greater than” vs “less than” rules on either spatial or numerical values. A majority of the engaged neurons were selective for either the spatial or numerical judgments. However, a significant proportion of neurons were “generalists” in the sense that they coded both types magnitude judgments.
Eiselt and Nieder (2013) Journal of Neuroscience
This supports a growing body of evidence that many neurons in higher-level cortex can participate in different functions. Like LIP neurons that categorize both motion and objects (Fitzgerald et al, Nature Neurosciene, 2011), these neurons were cognitive generalists that can participate in different magnitude judgments. We have shown that the proportion of specialists vs generalists neurons in the PFC depends on task demands. If the two category problems are disssimilar (cats vs dog and sport cars vs sedans) and can’t be confused, the majority of PFC neurons were generalists.. If instead, the category problems are similar and can easily be confused (categorizing the same set of animals in two different ways), the modal group of PFC neurons were specialists. It is as if the PFC was orthogonalizing the two potentially confusable categories to reduce errors. This shows that the PFC is highly sensitive to top-down demands, more so than bottom-up information, and can adapt the way it represents information to meet current cognitive demands.
For further reading, see:
Cromer, J.A., Roy, J.E., and Miller, E.K. (2010) Representation of multiple, independent categories in the primate prefrontal cortex. Neuron, 66: 796-807. View PDF »
Roy, J.E., Riesenhuber, M., Poggio, T., and Miller, E.K. (2010) Prefrontal cortex activity during flexible categorization. Journal of Neuroscience, 30:8519-8528. View PDF »
Limber Neurons for a Nimble Mind
Earl K. Miller and Stefano Fusi
Neuron. 78:211-213, 2013. (Preview)
View PDF
For years, researchers have noted that many neurons in the prefontal cortex have “weird” properties. They respond to a wide range of seemingly unrelated unrelated information. These kitchen sink, “mixed selectivity” neurons were often ignored or dismissed because they didn’t seem to make sense (well, except to network modelers who knew about hidden units and support vector machines). Stokes et al recorded from multiple electrodes in the prefrontal cortex. This revealed shifting patterns of PFC activity that followed a trajectory through multi-dimensional space from signaling sensory events to internal factors like rules and decisions. Many PFC neurons participated in multiple states. Thus, mixed selectivity doesn’t result in cortical porridge but rather an orderly progression of mental states, provided you have multiple electrodes and can simultaneously take multiple neurons into account.
Stokes et al. (2013) Neuron, 78: 364-375
Read a Preview of Stokes et al:
Miller, E.K. and Fusi, S. (2013) Limber neurons for a nimble mind. Neuron. 78:211-213. View PDF »
A model that shows how oscillations in different neuron populations can drive each other towards synchrony at different frequencies. The system can fall into a mode in which it explores synchrony across a range of oscillations. Among other things, the model shows how oscillations across neurons can be highly dynamic yet their synchroncy can be stable. The idea that oscillatory synchrony provides communication channels between neurons has been criticized because the frequencies bounce around and therefore are not stable enough to support communication . This model shows that synchrony is stable even if the exact frequency is not. (BTW, no one complains that the activity of single neurons bounce around).
http://tinyurl.com/b5e4ywc
For a discussion of the role of synchrony in neural communication see:
Miller, E.K. and Buschman, T.J. (2013) Cortical circuits for the control of attention. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 23:216–222 View PDF »
Miller, E.K. and Fusi, S. (2013) Limber neurons for a nimble mind. Neuron. 78:211-213.
View PDF
In this issue of Neuron, Stokes et al (2013) demonstrate that cortical neurons that adapt their properties with task demands form patterns reflecting the shifting mental states needed to solve the task. Adaptive neurons may be critical to hallmarks of cognition: behavioral complexity and flexibility.
Robert Desimone, Director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research answers 3 questions about the new federal BRAIN initiative.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/robert-desimone-on-the-federal-brain-initiative-0423.html