https://xcancel.com/i/status/2047758591663177778


for the first time in history, a brain implant has been approved for commercial sale. you can actually buy one.

it's called neo. costs around $15,000.

the question everyone asks first: does it actually work?

here's what the implant does.

a coin-sized chip gets placed on the surface of the brain, right over the area that controls movement.

when a paralyzed patient imagines moving their hand, the chip reads that signal, sends it to a computer, and the computer drives a mechanical glove that moves for them

picking up objects, gripping utensils, handling daily tasks.

all from thought alone.

the whole surgery takes an hour and 40 minutes.

surgeons thin the skull, open a small window, and place two electrodes directly on the surface of the brain.

then they close it up, patients go home within a week.

32 patients with spinal cord injuries were implanted in a clinical trial led by huashan hospital

Deje sa mi jeden zvláštny fenomén, ktorý neviem kde môže mať príčinu

Mám to už dlhší čas a ide o že v prednej časti mozgu pociťujem akoby, ja ani neviem ako to popísať, je to taký náhly nával absolútneho šťastia, hyperfocusu a akokeby totálnej absorbcie realitou. Je ale zaujímavé, že to nie je ničím podmienené, stáva sa to keď si varím obed alebo umývam zuby. Ráno, naobed, večer, pri akýchkoľvek myšlienkach, za akýchkoľvek emócií. Príde a odíde a trvá to celé jednu sekundu. Ale je to dosť sila a chcela by som vedieť čo to je. Hľadala som na nete v súvislosti s výskumami v oblasti neurochémie a nič som nenašla, nič z hľadiska vedy, aká porucha v neutransmiteroch to je, len samé budhistické stránky. Zdôrazňujem, že vôbec nemeditujem ani sa nevenujem žiadnemu duchovnu ani nič podobné.

Nemôžem byť vhodná na nejaké pokusy?
Nechtiac k

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-machine-reveals-role-culture-words.html

Mozek a jeho tajemstvi (aneb Patrani neurologu po tom co nas cini ludmi)
na predaj

A study published in 2017 has overturned a 100-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron "fire," posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders. To understand why this is important, we need to go back to 1907 when a French neuroscientist named Louis Lapicque proposed a model to describe how the voltage of a nerve cell's membrane increases as a current is applied. Once reaching a certain threshold, the neuron reacts with a spike of activity, after which the membrane's voltage resets. What this means is a neuron won't send a message unless it collects a strong enough signal. Lapique's equations weren't the last word on the matter, not by far. But the basic principle of his integrate-and-fire model has remained relatively unchallenged in subsequent descriptions, today forming the foundation of most neuronal computational schemes. According to the researchers, the lengthy history of the idea has meant few have bothered to question whether it's accurate.

The experiments approached the question from two angles -- one exploring the nature of the activity spike based on exactly where the current was applied to a neuron, the other looking at the effect multiple inputs had on a nerve's firing. Their results suggest the direction of a received signal can make all the difference in how a neuron responds. A weak signal from the left arriving with a weak signal from the right won't combine to build a voltage that kicks off a spike of activity. But a single strong signal from a particular direction can result in a message. This potentially new way of describing what's known as spatial summation could lead to a novel method of categorizing neurons, one that sorts them based on how they compute incoming signals or how fine their resolution is, based on a particular direction. Better yet, it could even lead to discoveries that explain certain neurological disorders.
https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-study-overturns-a-100-year-old-assumption-on-how-brains-work

Literatura v kognitivnych suvislostiach
https://www.martinus.sk/?uItem=270118

For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation. A growing body of research suggested they could, but then a Nature paper last year raised doubts. Now, a new study published today in another of the Nature family of journals -- Nature Medicine -- tips the balance back toward "yes." In light of the new study, "I would say that there is an overwhelming case for the neurogenesis throughout life in humans," Jonas Frisen, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an e-mail. Frisen, who was not involved in the new research, wrote a News and Views about the study in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

The researchers, from Spain, tested a variety of methods of preserving brain tissue from 58 newly deceased people. They found that different methods of preservation led to different conclusions about whether new neurons could develop in the adult and aging brain. Brain tissue has to be preserved within a few hours after death, and specific chemicals used to preserve the tissue, or the proteins that identify newly developing cells will be destroyed, said Maria Llorens-Martin, the paper's senior author. Other researchers have missed the presence of these cells, because their brain tissue was not as precisely preserved, says Llorens-Martin, a neuroscientist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain. Jenny Hsieh, a professor at the University of Texas San Antonio who was not involved in the new research, said the study provides a lesson for all scientists who rely on the generosity of brain donations. "If and when we go and look at something in human postmortem, we have to be very cautious about these technical issues."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/03/25/2118201/the-adult-brain-does-grow-new-neurons-after-all-study-says

https://www.ulib.sk/sk/spravy/archiv/nove-tituly-ponuke-casopisov-ktore-ukb-ponuka-svojim-pouzivatelom.html

ponuknut njake knihy z danej oblasti na predaj?

https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg

Summary:
Bodies have bioelectrical patterns that store information "memories" separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, so that being able to control them is basically like a holy grail of regenerative medicine. It also offers interesting new insights for AI and cognition.

Neviem do akeho fora s tymto requestom, nemate nahodou niekto pristup?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-communicate-with-mechanical-pulses-not-electric-signals/

ked tak preparentujem

klasicka zapletka s novym nametom:

the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these two patients, we found something completely different than Sperry and Gazzaniga before us. Both patients showed full awareness of presence and location of stimuli throughout the entire visual field -- right and left, both.
https://aeon.co/ideas/when-you-split-the-brain-do-you-split-the-person

The announcement of the general availability of Face API, Computer Vision API and Content Moderator API was made at the Microsoft Data Amp online event.

Ondrej Havlíček z Max Planck institue bude v pondelok 10.4. o 17:30 v Brne na FF hovoriť o prediktívnom spracování. Viac vo FB evente.

<

At Recode's conference last year, Elon Musk said he would love to see someone do something about linking human brains with computers. With no other human being volunteering, Mr. Musk -- who founded PayPal and OpenAI, thought of Hyperloop, is working on a boring company, and runs SpaceX, TeslaX, SolarCity -- is now working on it. From a report on WSJ:
Internal sources tell the WSJ that the company, called Neuralink, is developing "neural lace" technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Neural lace involves implanting electrodes in the brain so people could upload or download their thoughts to or from a computer, according to the WSJ report. The product could allow humans to achieve higher levels of cognitive function.
From WSJ's report (paywalled):
The founder and chief executive of Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.has launched another company called Neuralink Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. Neuralink is pursuing what Mr. Musk calls "neural lace" technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts. Mr. Musk didn't respond to a request for comment. Max Hodak, who said he is a "member of the founding team," confirmed the company's existence and Mr. Musk's involvement.

A study published in the journal eLife describes three participants that broke new ground in the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by people with paralysis. One of the participants, a 64-year-old man paralyzed by a spinal cord injury, "set a new record for speed in a 'copy typing' task," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Copying sentences like 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,' he typed at a relatively blistering rate of eight words per minute." From the report:
This experimental gear is far from being ready for clinical use: To send data from their implanted brain chips, the participants wear head-mounted components with wires that connect to the computer. But Henderson's team, part of the multiuniversity BrainGate consortium, is contributing to the development of devices that can be used by people in their everyday lives, not just in the lab. "All our research is based on helping people with disabilities," Henderson tells IEEE Spectrum. Here's how the system works: The tiny implant, about the size of a baby aspirin, is inserted into the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for voluntary movement. The implant's array of electrodes record electrical signals from neurons that "fire" as the person thinks of making a motion like moving their right hand -- even if they're paralyzed and can't actually move it. The BrainGate decoding software interprets the signal and converts it into a command for the computer cursor. Interestingly, the system worked best when the researchers customized it for each participant. To train the decoder, each person would imagine a series of different movements (like moving their whole right arm or wiggling their left thumb) while the researchers looked at the data coming from the electrodes and tried to find the most obvious and reliable signal. Each participant ended up imagining a different movement to control the cursor. The woman with ALS imagined moving her index finger and thumb to control the cursor's left-right and up-down motions. Henderson says that after a while, she didn't have to think about moving the two digits independently. "When she became facile with this, she said it wasn't anything conscious; she felt like she was controlling a joystick," he says. The man with the spinal cord injury imagined moving his whole arm as if he were sliding a puck across a table. "Each participant settled on control modality that worked best," Henderson says.
You can watch a video about the study here.

v progresbare bude vo stvrtok event:
https://www.progressbar.sk/calendar/understanding-world-through-ai
https://www.facebook.com/events/144243352732594/?active_tab=about

~"How to build a mind" (30c3) suggested specifications for an architecture of cognition;
~"From computation to consciousness" (31c3) explored the mind's computational foundations;
~"Computational metapsychology" (32c3) discussed the individual and social construction of meaning.
~"Machine dreams" sketches how the computational machinery of our brains leads to our experience a subjective world. We will look at the conductor theory of consciousness, some of the mental structures contributing to our models of self and world, and the unreasonable effectiveness of neural processes in modeling physics.


pojdete niekto?

Neuroscientists have designed a brain-reading device to hold simple conversations with "locked-in" patients that promises to transform the lives of people who are too disabled to communicate. Details of four patients who were able to communicate using what is being touted as a groundbreaking system were made public this week. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Now researchers in Europe say they've found out the answer after using a brain-computer interface to communicate with four people completely locked in after losing all voluntary movement due to Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In response to the statement "I love to live" three of the four replied yes. They also said yes when asked "Are you happy?" Designed by neuroscientist Niels Birbaumer, now at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, the brain-computer interface fits on a person's head like a swimming cap and measures changes in electrical waves emanating from the brain and also blood flow using a technique known as near-infrared spectroscopy. To verify the four could communicate, Birbaumer's team asked patients, over the course of about 10 days of testing, to respond yes or no to statements such as "You were born in Berlin" or "Paris is the capital of Germany" by modulating their thoughts and altering the blood-flow pattern. The answers relayed through the system were consistent about 70 percent of the time, substantially better than chance.

https://backchannel.com/i-had-one-night-to-invent-interstellar-travel-b2466882ef5c#.6vfci1m29

embodied cognition service.


IBM's Project Intu brings Watson's Capabilities To Any Device
IBM has launched a new system-agnostic platform called Project Intu with which it aims to bring "embodied cognition" to a range of devices. From a report on SiliconAngle:
In IBM's parlance, "cognitive computing" refers to machine learning. The idea behind Project Intu is that developers will be able to use the platform to embed the various machine learning functions offered by IBM's Watson service into various applications and devices, and make them work across a wide spectrum of form factors. So, for example, developers will be able to use Project Intu's capabilities to embed machine learning capabilities into pretty much any kind of device, from avatars to drones to robots and just about any other kind of Internet of Things' device. As a result, these devices will be able to "interact more naturally" with users via a range of emotions and behaviors, leading to more meaningful and immersive experiences for users, IBM said. What's more, because Project Intu is system-agnostic, developers can use it to build cognitive experiences on a wide range of operating systems, be it Raspberry PI, MacOS, Windows or Linux. Project Intu is still an experimental platform, and it can be accessed via the Watson Developer Cloud, the Intu Gateway and also on GitHub.

https://kyberia.sk/id/8247032

Cognitive architectures are a part of research in general AI, which began in the 1950s with the goal of
creating programs that could reason about problems across different domains, develop insights, adapt to
new situations and reflect on themselves. Similarly, the ultimate goal of research in cognitive architectures
is to achieve human-level artificial intelligence. According to Russell and Norvig [2] such artificial
intelligence may be realized in four different ways: systems that think like humans, systems that think
rationally, systems that act like humans, and systems that act rationally. The existing cognitive architectures
have explored all four possibilities. For instance, human-like thought is pursued by the architectures
stemming from cognitive modeling. In this case, the errors made by an intelligent system are tolerated as
long as they match errors typically made by people in similar situations. This is in contrast to rationally
thinking systems which are required to produce consistent and correct conclusions for arbitrary tasks. A
similar distinction is made for machines that act like humans or act rationally. Machines in either of these
groups are not expected to think like humans, only their actions or behavior is taken into account.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08602v1.pdf

http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/archive.html?imm_mid=0e7547&cmp=em-data-free-na-stny16_nem4_end_summer

IBM has created the world's first artificial nanoscale stochastic phase-change neurons and has already created and used a population of 500 of them to process a signal in a similar manner as the brain. Ars Technica reports: "Like a biological neuron, IBM's artificial neuron has inputs (dendrites), a neuronal membrane (lipid bilayer) around the spike generator (soma, nucleus), and an output (axon). There's also a back-propagation link from the spike generator back to the inputs, to reinforce the strength of some input spikes. The key difference is in the neuronal membrane. In IBM's neuron, the membrane is replaced with a small square of germanium-antimony-tellurium (GeSbTe or GST). GST, which happens to be the main active ingredient in rewritable optical discs, is a phase-change material. This means it can happily exist in two different phases (in this case crystalline and amorphous), and easily switch between the two, usually by applying heat (by way of laser or electricity). A phase-change material has very different physical properties depending on which phase it's in: in the case of GST, its amorphous phase is an electrical insulator, while the crystalline phase conducts. With the artificial neurons, the square of GST begins life in its amorphous phase. Then, as spikes arrive from the inputs, the GST slowly begins to crystallize. Eventually, the GST crystallizes enough that it becomes conductive -- and voila, electricity flows across the membrane and creates a spike. After an arbitrary refractory period (a resting period where something isn't responsive to stimuli), the GST is reset back to its amorphous phase and the process begins again."

Vysharovat experience f2f, pokecať o alternatívach, ..
Komorná atmosféra o legálnych kognitívnych drogách
https://progressbar.sk/calendar/nootropics-experience-session
https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics

Dávam do pozornosti náš pokus oživiť kognitívnu scénu v ČR, organizujeme v Prahe a Brne prednášky a workshopy. Budem to tu obcas spamovat, ale ak chcete mat prehlad, lajkujte tutoky:

facebooky, oficialna stranka, mailinglist

najblizsie v prahe a v brne:



staré prednášky

KOGNICE A UMĚLÝ ŽIVOT - 14. ročník
Tradičná konferencia má nových organizátorov a snaží sa otvoriť širšiemu spektru účastníkov.

1.6. - 3.6., Telč (pri Brne),
Facebooky, Internety

(pravdepodobne budete počuť i moju maličkosť rečniť o vedomí, môžete prísť poflamovať irl)

Neskutocne dobry talk:



Jedna z myslienok, co v nej padla: "When we teach our kids we should probably not think about how to give them truth, we should think about how to put them on an interesting gradient that makes them to explore the world"

je marek rosa na kyberii?

13.00 - 14.30:

dr hab. Michal Wierzchoń: "How do we know what we see and remember? Subjective measures of awareness in perception and memory."

14.45 - 15.30:

Marta Łukowska, MA: "Can we see with our heart?"

15.35 - 16.20:

Bartosz Majchrowicz, MA: "Perception in intentional action: time, space, and force"


facebooky