at the intersection of neuroscience and AI
Hippocampus may still have a role in recalling old memories
by Bayle Shanks6 Dec 2011 at 12:34 am
Paraphrasing/adding to the article abstract: prevailing theory suggests that long-term memories are encoded via a two-phase process requiring temporary involvement of the hippocampus followed by permanent storage in the neocortex. However this group found that, even weeks later, after the memories are supposed to be independent of the hippocampus, they could disrupt recall by briefly suppressing h
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Scientists use MRI to reveal the movies in our mind
by Bayle Shanks27 Sep 2011 at 7:59 am
Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind.
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Hippocampal CA1 prosthesis affects memory
by Bayle Shanks17 Jun 2011 at 5:32 pm
Berger, Hampson, Song, Goonawardena, Marmarelis, and Deadwyler created a system for recording from and stimulating up to 32 neurons at once. The system learned a model to predict firing of some hippocampal CA1 neurons given some inputs from CA3, and could be “played back” later.
In a delayed-nonmatch-to-sample task, a rat was shown one of two levers, then there was a delay during whic
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Multisensory homunculi align
by Bayle Shanks27 May 2011 at 3:26 am
Read on for a talk abstract describing aligned visual and tactile homunculi in parietal cortex.
MAPPING MULTISENSORY REPRESENTATIONS OF PERIPERSONAL SPACE
Ruey-Song Huang
Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, and Department of Cognitive Science
http://sccn.ucsd.edu/~rshuang/
This talk will present our recent progress in mapping multisensory representation
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Neurons with similar tuning more likely to be connected
by Bayle Shanks27 May 2011 at 2:34 am
From the abstract: … we determine synaptic connectivity between nearby layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in vitro, the response properties of which were first characterized in mouse visual cortex in vivo. We found that connection probability was related to the similarity of visually driven neuronal activity. Neurons with the same preference for oriented stimuli connected at twice the rate of neuro
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Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project reported to be pursuing $1.4 billio...
by Bayle Shanks20 May 2011 at 6:04 pm
This dailymail article claims that the Human Brain Project, directed by Henry Markram, is pursuing a 1 billion euro grant to simulate the human brain in 12 years.
By way of Nextbigfuture, by way of Hackernews.
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Dopamine error
by Bayle Shanks11 May 2011 at 10:59 pm
(pun intended). I am embarrassed to say that earlier today I remarked to a colleague that dopamine only encodes unexpected reward, not unexpected lack of reward. This is (afaik) incorrect. It has a baseline level of firing that goes down when there is an unexpected lack of reward (see fig 1 in Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, P. Read Montague. A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward)
However, be
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Local sleep in awake rats
by Bayle Shanks29 Apr 2011 at 5:39 am
this experiment claims to show that
(1) when rats are sleep-deprived, small populations of rat brain neurons can fall asleep while the rest of the rat is awake, and
(2) this may correspond to performance degradation
summary:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/04/if-you-only-feel-half-awake-you-probably-are.ars
article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7344/full/nature10009.html
i
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Increasing adult hippocampal neurogenesis is sufficient to improve pattern se...
by Bayle Shanks6 Apr 2011 at 3:32 pm
Sahay A, Scobie KN, Hill AS, O’Carroll CM, Kheirbek MA, Burghardt NS,
Fenton AA, Dranovsky A, Hen R. Increasing adult hippocampal neurogenesis is sufficient to improve
pattern separation. Nature. 2011 Apr 3
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09817.html
Abstract after the break.
Adult hippocampal neurogenesis is a unique form of neural circuit plasticity that resul
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Google Science Fair deadline tomorrow!
by Bayle Shanks6 Apr 2011 at 2:21 am
http://www.google.com/events/sciencefair/
“Google’s worldwide Science Fair competition …is calling for entries over the next few days. It gives kids the opportunity to join in a new kind of online science competition…offering them the chance to win … prizes including a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands or a $50,000 scholarship.”
They paid us to post this vide
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