Canadian scientists create a functioning, virtual brain | canada.com

Canadian scientists create a functioning, virtual brain | canada.com: 

Chris Eliasmith has spent years contemplating how to build a brain.
He is about to publish a book with instructions, which describes the grey matter’s architecture and how the different components interact.
“Then I thought the only way people are going to believe me is if I demonstrate it,” says the University of Waterloo neuroscientist.
So Eliasmith’s team built Spaun, which was billed Thursday as “the world’s largest simulation of a functioning brain.”

Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness

ScienceDirect - Trends in Cognitive Sciences : Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness:

by Hakwan Lau and David Rosenthal

Abstract:

Higher-order theories of consciousness argue that conscious awareness crucially depends on higher-order mental representations that represent oneself as being in particular mental states. These theories have featured prominently in recent debates on conscious awareness. We provide new leverage on these debates by reviewing the empirical evidence in support of the higher-order view. We focus on evidence that distinguishes the higher-order view from its alternatives, such as the first-order, global workspace and recurrent visual processing theories. We defend the higher-order view against several major criticisms, such as prefrontal activity reflects attention but not awareness, and prefrontal lesion does not abolish awareness. Although the higher-order approach originated in philosophical discussions, we show that it is testable and has received substantial empirical support.

Champalimaud Neuroscience Symposium

http://symposium.neuro.fchampalimaud.org/

The Champalimaud Neuroscience Symposium will bring together researchers from around the world who are interested in solving the puzzle of the brain. The Programme includes 30 distinguished speakers and poster sessions. The invited speakers reflect the interests of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme and cover a broad range of areas within neuroscience. The Symposium will take place at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown on the waterfront in central Lisbon, Portugal. We are looking forward to a lively and stimulating scientific meeting, and we hope that you will join us.

Megan R. Carey
Zachary Mainen

Marta Moita
Scientific Committee

Re Portugal

I'm back in NYC from a week of sun, beer, neuroscience, qualia, and zen in lovely Lisboa at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

Zach Mainen, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, ran a week-long course on consciousness and first-person methodology for the 2010 class of students in the International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme (with assistance from 2008 student Scott Rennie). Brian Keeley (who knows Zach from like a million years ago when they were together at University of California, San Diego) and I were brought on board to hang out in general as well as provide neurophilosophical overviews of consciousness, free will, and personal identity.



Each morning, the class kicked off with a half-hour of meditation led by monks from a local zen dojo. Then we set off to do things like coach opposing teams of students in constructing arguments about whether the self was something that could survive teleportation.

Thursday afternoon I presented "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" in the Neuroscience Seminar Series (abstract and answer here). It was fun to see so many neuroscientists get passionate about qualia!



Saturday afternoon, Brian and I took a teleporter to Cascais, where someone accidentally hit the "receive" button too many times.





(Photos from my flickr set, Lisbon 2011: Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown)

Pete to Portugal

This looks pretty cool.

Next week, my good buddy Brian Keeley and I are heading to Lisbon to help run a week-long course on consciousness for the Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. While there, I'll also be giving a talk, "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" More news, plus the answer to that titular question, when I get back to NYC later in May.

Vancouver Workshop and Conference on Cortical Color Vision

This summer I'm going to this pretty sweet looking conference and workshop, "More or Less: Varieties of Human Cortical Color Vision", that Kathleen Akins and Brit Brogaard are organizing. The call for participants is open now, see this website (http://www.sfu.ca/colour/) for full details. Below is a blurby excerpt. I hope to see lots of Hammer Heads there!

BLURB:


Philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychologists and researchers within the cognitive sciences are warmly invited to attend the conference and to submit posters.
The focus of this conference is “colour beyond the retina”, both the normal neurophysiology of human cortical colour mechanisms and a variety of cortical colour ‘anomalies’, in particular:

• Cerebral Achromatopsia 
• Colour Synaesthesias 
• Colour Blindsight 
• Cortical Colour Development

Early career researchers and graduate students are  invited to apply for a two day intensive workshop held prior to the conference.

Neuroscience Boot Camp

Brain Hammer reader, Martha Farah, sends the following (which looks pretty cool):

The University of Pennsylvania announces their 3rd annual Neuroscience Boot Camp, July 31-August 10!

Why Neuroscience Boot Camp? Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of philosophy, sociology, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role.

The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp gives participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and equips them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp? Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Each lecture will be followed by extensive Q&A. Break-out groups allow participants to delve more deeply into topics of relevance to their fields. Laboratory visits will include trips to an MRI scanner, an EEG/ERP lab, an animal neurophysiology lab, and a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab. Participants will also have access to an extensive online library of copyrighted materials selected for relevance to the Boot Camp, including classic and review articles and textbook chapters in cognitive and affective neuroscience and the applications of neuroscience to diverse fields. See http://lawneuro.typepad.com/the-law-and-neuroscience-blog/2009/08/bloggin-from-boot-camp-day-one.html for a daily blog post from our first Boot Camp.

Who should apply? College and university faculty, working professionals and graduate students are encouraged to apply. The only prerequisites are a grasp of basic statistics and at least a dim recollection of high school biology and physics. (A short set of readings will be made available prior to the Boot Camp to remind you about the essentials.)

More details: Participants will be housed on campus in air-conditioned apartment-style suites with private bedrooms. Sessions begin at 8:30 AM and end at 5:15. Breakfast and lunch will be eaten with the group; dinners are on your own. The academic program spans nine days, Monday, August 1st - Wednesday, August 10th with half of Saturday and all of Sunday off. There will be an opening reception on the evening of Sunday July 31st and a gala dinner on the last evening.

The cost of tuition, room and board is $4,500; limited scholarship support is available. Complete applications are due by midnight on February 1st. You will be notified of the status of your application by March 7th, and will have until April 1st to confirm attendance.

Visit http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/events/neuroscience-bootcamp for more information!

Slate article on the neural distinction between wanting and liking

This recent article in Slate seems damn appropriate for all ye nerds reading Infinite Jest this summer.

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. By Emily Yoffe

Juicy excerpts:

[Olds] eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

[...]

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds' rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

Dan Lloyd's Brain Music in New Scientist

Philosopher Dan Lloyd has developed a technique for creating musical files based on brain scans. The brain tunes allow for interesting comparisons between normal and abnormal activity. From a recent article in New Scientist:

To turn such scans into music, philosopher Dan Lloyd at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, identified regions that become active together and assigned each of these groups a different pitch. He then created software that analyses a series of scans and generates the notes at these pitches as the corresponding brain areas light up. Each note is played at a volume that corresponds to the intensity of activity.

When Lloyd fed the software a set of scans of his own brain taken as he switched between driving a virtual-reality car and resting, he found that he could detect the switch-over in the sounds.

Lloyd then gave the software scans taken from volunteers with dementia and schizophrenia, and from healthy volunteers. The brains of people with schizophrenia switched between low and high activity more erratically than healthy brains, allowing the two types of brain to be distinguished by sound alone.