“The Mandala of the Mind”: The long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, spanning the cortex, thalamus, and basal ganglia, showing 6,602 long-distance connections between 383 brain regions. (PNAS)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published Tuesday a landmark paper entitled “Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain” (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips.

“We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, which is essential for understanding the brain’s behavior, complexity, dynamics and computation,” Dr. Modha says. “We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain.

“We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain and grounded in anatomical tracing studies that is a stepping stone to both fundamental and applied research in neuroscience and cognitive computing.”

The scientists focused on the long-distance network of 383 brain regions and 6,602 long-distance brain connections that travel through the brain’s white matter, which are like the “interstate highways” between far-flung brain regions, he explained, while short-distance gray matter connections (based on neurons) constitute “local roads” within a brain region and its sub-structures.  

Their research builds upon a publicly available database called Collation of Connectivity data on the Macaque brain (CoCoMac), which compiles anatomical tracing data from over 400 scientific reports from neuroanatomists published over the last half-century.

“We studied four times the number of brain regions and have compiled nearly three times the number of connections when compared to the largest previous endeavor,” he pointed out. “Our data may open up entirely new ways of analyzing, understanding, and, eventually, imitating the network architecture of the brain, which according to Marian C. Diamond and Arnold B. Scheibel is “the most complex mass of protoplasm on earth—perhaps even in our galaxy.”

The center of higher cognition and consciousness?

Core subnetwork (PNAS)

The brain network they found contains a “tightly integrated core that might be at the heart of higher cognition and even consciousness … and may be a key to the age-old question of how the mind arises from the brain.” The core spans parts of premotor cortex, prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, thalamus, basal ganglia, cingulate cortex, insula, and visual cortex.

Prefrontal cortex: integrator-distributor of information

By ranking brain regions (similar to how search engines rank web pages), they found evidence that the prefrontal cortex, while physically located in the front of the brain, is a functionally central part of the brain that might act as an integrator and distributor of information. Think of it as a switchboard.

As they stated in the PNAS paper, “The network opens the door to the application of large-scale network-theoretic analysis that has been so successful in understanding the Internet, metabolic networks, protein interaction networks, various social networks, and in searching the world-wide web. The network will be an indispensable foundation for clinical, systems, cognitive, and computational neurosciences as well as cognitive computing.”

The findings will also help them design the routing architecture for a network of cognitive computing chips, they suggest.

The research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Sciences Office, Program: Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.

Dr. Modha presented the exciting findings of this study in a talk I attended at the Toward A Science Of Consciousness conference in Tucson in April, but he asked us to hold off on covering this until the formal paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

A detailed Powerpoint slide show with voice narration (60 slides, ~52 minutes, ~50 MB) is downloadable here.

—-Taken from www.kurzweilai.net

I hold a scrap of paper in the darkness and light it. I watch it burn bright and curl, disappearing into nothingness, and the heat burns my fingers. Where has it gone? What has it become? I cannot shake the feeling that I have witnessed a form of transcendence.

A new nano-scale wiretap device could tell researchers about the inner workings of cells, according to a new Harvard study.

It involves a transistor that can take electrical readings, embedded inside a membrane that fits inconspicuously inside an individual living cell. The tiny probe, which is smaller than many viruses, is the first semiconductor device to take measurements of the inside of a cell.

The nano-probe infiltrated living cells without damaging them, which is a drastic improvement over current cell-tapping technology, according to Harvard chemistry professor Charles Lieber, who led the research team.

NanoFETs — nano-scale field-effect transistors — could allow scientists to “interrogate” cells, in the authors’ words, to understand electrical impulses that cause neurons fire or heart cells to beat.

Existing transistor probes can only do this from the exterior of cells, like metal detectors hovering over the ground, as Nature News reports. Transistors need two electrical contacts to measure voltage differences, and inserting two large contacts into a cell can damage it. Instead, the new device uses a nanowire shaped into hairpin. The bent tip penetrates the cell, and the two arms hang out the side, where they serve as the transistor’s electrical contacts.

This breakthrough comes with an added bonus — a new nanowire fabrication process that makes it easier to control the way nanowires are grown. Lieber and his team figured out that if they stopped growing nanowires at a certain stage, they could produce the kink required to bend the wire 120 degrees, Nature News reports.

The new device is also easier to insert than other electrical monitoring devices, because the researchers tricked the cell into absorbing it. When they coated the device with a double layer of lipids — the same material that cell membranes are made of — the cell absorbed it, using the same process that allows cells to engulf viruses and bacteria, according to a Harvard news release.

The devices could be used to measure ion flux and electrical signals in the nervous system, Lieber says. They could also be fitted with receptors that can check for protein expression and other biochemical changes, which would be useful for determining the efficacy of new drugs, especially for heart disease.

The device was described this week in the journal

—taken from Popular Science 08.13.2010

(The M-Dress)

Modern technology has created some thorny problems (Can a particle accelerator open up a cataclysmic black hole that will destroy the Earth? What the hell should we do with all of these nuclear weapons anyhow?), but perhaps none is so persistent as a (predominantly) female problem known as the little black dress conundrum. As in, “where will I keep my cell phone if I wear this incredibly form-fitting, irresistibly sexy but pocket-less little black dress?” High-tech high-fashion purveyors CuteCircuit have finally found the solution: a dress that IS a cell phone.

The M-dress is a wearable cell phone with a sim card and antenna integrated into the fabric, and while it’s not necessarily perfect, it does make carrying a cell phone around a non-issue. But it also might turn some heads — and not necessarily in a good way. To answer an incoming call, the wearer lifts her hand to her ear like an imaginary telephone and speaks into her imaginary receiver (we’re presuming the receiver tech is actually built into the cuff).

There’s no screen and no other interface of any kind, so you won’t know who’s calling. What’s more, you don’t have a way to dial out, so you can only pre-program a single number. We suggest you make that number the operator, who can patch you through to any number you like. Then you’ll just need to make sure you keep your cell phone with you so you have all your contact info.

Problem solved.

—Taken from Popular Science 08.19.2010