UC San Diego Today: These Screen-printed, Flexible Sensors Allow Earbuds to Record Brain Activity and Exercise Levels . “A pair of earbuds can be turned into a tool to record the electrical activity of the brain as well as levels of lactate in the body with the addition of two flexible sensors screen-printed onto a stamp-like flexible surface.”
The Engineer: Digital avatar relays decoded brain signals to give voice to paralysed woman. “A woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke can speak through a digital avatar following the development of a brain-computer interface at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. The breakthrough marks the first time that speech or facial expressions have been synthesised from brain signals.”
Newswise: Classic rock music can be recreated from recorded brain activity. “Researchers led by Ludovic Bellier at the University of California, Berkeley, US, demonstrate that recognizable versions of classic Pink Floyd rock music can be reconstructed from brain activity that was recorded while patients listened to the song. Published August 15th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study used nonlinear modeling to decode brain activity and reconstruct the song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’. Encoding models revealed a new cortical subregion in the temporal lobe that underlies rhythm perception, which could be exploited by future brain-machine-interfaces.”
Scientific Data: ReCANVo: A database of real-world communicative and affective nonverbal vocalizations . “Here, we present ReCANVo: Real-World Communicative and Affective Nonverbal Vocalizations – a novel dataset of non-speech vocalizations labeled by function from minimally speaking individuals. The ReCANVo database contains over 7000 vocalizations spanning communicative and affective functions from eight minimally speaking individuals, along with communication profiles for each participant.”
Yale News: Yale researchers encourage brain data reuse with CAROT. “The ability to map connections between different regions of the brain has helped scientists better understand the brain’s relationship to behavior, how brains differ between people, and how they’re affected by disease. These maps, called connectomes, consist of imaging data superimposed on atlases that define the locations and borders of different brain regions. But there are many different versions of brain atlases, and a connectome built on one can’t be directly compared to one built on another. In a new study, Yale researchers have developed a publicly available tool that allows for those comparisons.”
STAT News: Social media risks for youth mental health highlighted in new surgeon general report. “Amid what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Tuesday warning about social media’s impact on developing young brains.”
Berkeley News: ‘Raw’ data show AI signals mirror how the brain listens and learns. “New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that artificial intelligence (AI) systems can process signals in a way that is remarkably similar to how the brain interprets speech, a finding scientists say might help explain the black box of how AI systems operate.”
UC San Diego: AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent. “In a new paper published in Neural Computation, Professor Terrence Sejnowski of the University of California San Diego and Salk Institute, author of The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary and how to improve them in the future. According to Sejnowski, language models reflect the intelligence and diversity of their interviewer.”
PsyPost: Habitual checking of social media linked to altered brain development in young adolescents. “New neuroimaging research provides evidence that the frequency of checking social media during adolescent might influence how the brains of teenagers develop. The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, indicate the the use of social media is related to developmental changes in neural sensitivity to anticipation of social rewards and punishments.”
Brown University: Study offers neurological explanation for how brains bias partisans against new information. “People who share a political ideology have more similar ‘neural fingerprints’ of political words and process new information in similar ways, according to a new analysis led by Brown University researchers.”
Western University: Western researchers develop new open-source app for precise brain mapping. “The hippocampus is a small, complex, folded brain structure that holds clues to several brain disorders. It is also one of the most difficult-to-map regions of the brain. After developing a successful technique to digitally unfold the hippocampus, researchers at the Western Institute for Neuroscience have now built a new app using artificial intelligence (AI) to precisely map the structure. As part of a team led by Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Ali Khan, former PhD student Jordan DeKraker has developed an open-source app, HippUnfold, which uses state-of-the-art AI to digitally unfold the hard-to-reach areas of the hippocampus.”
Alzforum: Goodbye Antibodies, Hello AlzAntibodies: New Database is Growing on Alzforum. “After two decades and more than 30,000 entries, Alzforum’s original Antibodies database has been retired. A listing of antibodies relevant to neurodegenerative disease research, the database had in recent years been rendered increasingly redundant by the proliferation of online antibody compendia and manufacturers’ catalogs. In its place, Alzforum has created a new database, AlzAntibodies. It aims to provide detailed descriptions of antibodies selected by Alzforum curators based on community interest or novelty.”
Western University: Should you believe your eyes? Not necessarily in virtual reality says new study. “A new study by Western neuroscientists suggests that, unlike true reality, perception in virtual reality is more strongly influenced by our expectations than the visual information before our eyes.”
Phys .org: Artificial neural networks learn better when they spend time not learning at all. “Artificial neural networks leverage the architecture of the human brain to improve numerous technologies and systems, from basic science and medicine to finance and social media. In some ways, they have achieved superhuman performance, such as computational speed, but they fail in one key aspect: When artificial neural networks learn sequentially, new information overwrites previous information, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting.”
University of Glasgow: Researchers Propose A Roadmap To Understand Whether AI Models And The Human Brain Process Things The Same Way. “Researchers use Deep Neural Networks, or DNNs, to model the processing of information, and to investigate how this information processing matches that of humans…. New research, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences and led by the University of Glasgow’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, presents a new approach to understand whether the human brain and its DNN models recognise things in the same way, using similar steps of computations.”
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