Human Thought Controls Neurons in Brain. Neuroscience research involving epileptic patients with brain electrodes surgically implanted in their medial temporal lobes shows that patients learned to consciously control individual neurons deep in the brain with thoughts. Subjects learned to control mouse cursors, play video games and alter focus of digital images with their thoughts. The patients were each using brain computer interfaces, deep brain electrodes and software designed for the research. The article below offers more detail. Controlling Individual Cortical Nerve Cells by Human Thought Five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) , neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried of UCLA, and their colleagues discovered that a single neuron in the human brain can function much like a sophisticated computer and recognize people, landmarks, and objects, suggesting that a consistent and explicit code may help transform complex visual representations into long-term and more abstract memories.
Google Glasses : Official Presentation. Oculus Rift - Virtual Reality Headset for 3D Gaming | Oculus VR. Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science. Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers. Whether it is Gordon Gekko, Catherine Tramell, or Dexter Morgan, the mythology of the psychopath is captivating.
Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film. For many years, the gold standard for diagnosing psychopathy has been various forms of behavioural assessment. But now, Californian neuroscientist James Fallon claims he can diagnose psychopathy from a brain scan. “I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains. What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard from Fallon. If all ravens are black then all black birds must be ravens, right? Seek and ye shall find. Explaining emotion in the brain. Emotion has become a well-represented, and well-respected, topic of neuroscientific inquiry, as borne out by its exponential increase in citation indices (e.g. increases in publications with the word in their title by 300 in the 1980s, by 900 in the 1990s and by >1600 in the past 6 years according to Science Citation Index). The reasons for this increase lie with advances both in our theoretical understanding of emotions and in the development of new tools for exploring their neural basis—notably functional neuroimaging. These efforts have resulted in important advances also in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases, many of which feature dysfunctional emotions as one of the most disabling components. It is thus timely to take stock of what we have learned, and to publish books that summarize the state of the field.
Edmund Rolls' latest book, Emotion Explained, provides such a summary. The book opens with a series of questions: ‘What are emotions? Fig. 2.1.