Lifeboat Foundation

Australian scientists hope that a tiny device just 3cm long and a few millimetres wide will enable paralysed patients to walk again by allowing them to control bionic limbs with the power of subconscious thought.

The new device, dubbed the “bionic spine”, is the size of a small paperclip and will be implanted in three patients at the Royal Melbourne hospital in Victoria next year. The participants will be selected from the Austin Health spinal cord unit, and will be the first humans to trial the device, which so far has only been tested in sheep.

Doctors will make a tiny cut in the neck of the patients and feed a catheter containing the bionic spine up through the blood vessels leading into the brain, until it rests on top of the motor cortex, the part of the brain where nerve impulses that initiate voluntary muscle movements come from. The catheter will then be removed, leaving the bionic spine behind.

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Have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you where there? Or while in the middle of conversation forgot a person’s name? Or briefing your boss on a project, only to stumble because a crucial factoid escaped your mind?

Yeah, me too.

“Tip of the tongue” syndrome haunts us all — that feeling where you’re close to remembering something, but just can’t seem to get there. But what if, at that exact moment, an AI-powered “cognitive assistant” pitches in and delivers that missing piece of information straight into your ear?

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Carnegie Mellon University is embarking on a five-year, $12 million research effort to reverse-engineer the brain and “make computers think more like humans,” funded by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The research is led by Tai Sing Lee, a professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).

The research effort, through IARPA’s Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program, is part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative to revolutionize the understanding of the human brain.

Continue reading “CMU announces research project to reverse-engineer brain algorithms, funded by IARPA” »

(Facebook) The above passage, written in a combination of letters and numbers, has been circulating social media for years and purports that only certain “strong minds” can read it.

That’s not exactly true — just about everybody can read the message with ease. But according to one scientist, our ability to read such messages reveals something pretty incredible about the brain.

Interpreting passages like this hardly activates the section of the brain associated with numbers, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, part of a team of Spanish cognitive scientists who wrote five papers on the subject, told Business Insider. Instead, our brain knows to treat them like letters based on their similar appearance.

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So, when a co-worker or friend tells you that they are about to snap; they truly may mean it according to this new research.

The same group of neurons could make you a hero—or a rage-filled aggressor.

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Only one word that I can say “AMAZING”.

Rosemary Johnson had made music for the first time since suffering a devastating car crash in her 20s.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=evbPZlUoNXA

A new thriller starring Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds explores the idea of transferring consciousness from one body to another. Unlike Freaky Friday, or the myriad of other family movies and comedies that have explored the idea, this one actually explores the science of the process.

In the movie Self/less, a rich business man (Kingsley) is dying of cancer. However, he is able to prolong his “self” by transferring his consciousness from one body to another using a medical procedure called “shedding.”

Continue reading “Neuroscientist Discusses the Idea of Consciousness Transfer From the New Movie Self/less” »

“Full exploitation of this information is a major challenge,” officials with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wrote in a 2009 brief on “deep learning.”

“Human observation and analysis of [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] assets is essential, but the training of humans is both expensive and time-consuming. Human performance also varies due to individuals’ capabilities and training, fatigue, boredom, and human attentional capacity.”

Working with a team of researchers at MIT, DARPA is hoping to take all of that human know-how and shrink it down into processing unit no bigger than your cellphone, using a microchip known as “Eyeriss.” The concept relies on “neural networks;” computerized memory networks based on the workings of the human brain.

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Just when you believe things cannot get more stranger; a “Frankenstein” fund is created for a competition in the UK to bring a brain back to life.

The Brain Preservation Foundation is offerings a cash prize of $100,000 to anyone who can successfully develop a way to preserve and reanimate a human brain.

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