14 October 2008

The brain and the banjo

Bluegrass legend Eddie Adcock had brain surgery last month to correct an essential tremor -- an uncontrollable shaking that left him unable to play the banjo. During the surgery, he stayed awake to give feedback while surgeons prodded his brain, looking for the exact spot to stimulate to control the tremor. His method of feedback during surgery? He played the banjo. Astonishing footage from the BBC is here, or watch a news report from Good Morning America below:

Looking for more amazing tales from the brain? Watch Vilayanur Ramachadran's TEDTalk on the journey to the center of your mind; or Christopher deCharms' real-time fMRI of the brain in motion; or Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight.

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30 May 2008

fMRI can tell what noun you're thinking of (sometimes)

From Not Exactly Rocket Science, here's a thoughtful report on a new fMRI technique that -- 70 percent of the time, anyway -- can tell what noun a person is thinking of:

Tom Mitchell and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University [used] a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualise the brain activity of nine volunteers, as they concentrated on 60 different nouns. This 'training set' consisted of five words from each of 12 categories, such as animals, body parts, tools and vehicles.

The technique Mitchell's team used is of interest to word nerds:

Mitchell analysed how these words are used with the help of a "text corpus", a massive set of texts containing over a trillion words. A text corpus reflects how words are typically used in the English language. Linguists have used these tools to show that a word's meaning is captured to some extent by other words and phrases that it frequently appears next to.

With the corpus, Mitchell worked out how often the 60 nouns occur next to 25 verbs, including "see", "hear", "taste", "enter" and "drive". All of them are related to sensation and movement because other studies have suggested that objects are encoded in the brain in terms of how you sense them and what you can do with them.

View the word analysis behind the study >>
Read the abstract of the paper "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns" >>
Read the full blog post from Not Exactly Rocket Science >>

Meanwhile, in the latest Wired, psychiatrist Daniel Carlat looks at other fMRI "mind-reading" applications that purport to find psychological states -- like love, lying and OCD.

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25 March 2008

See inside your brain in real time: Christopher deCharms on TED.com

From last month's TED conference: Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRIs to watch the brain in action. Using this technology, if you move your arm, get angry, feel pain, you can see what it looks like in your brain as it happens -- and then you can learn to control it. The applications for real-time fMRI start with pain management and run on into the realm of science fiction, but this technology is very real. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:56.)

Watch Christopher deCharms's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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