Category: Brain
-
Changing the brain. Closing the TV…
Scientists showed that they could alter brain activity of rats and either wake them up or put them in an unconscious state by changing the firing rates of neurons in the central thalamus, a region known to regulate arousal. The study, published in eLIFE, was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health. (1) Increasing…
-
Crime with no punishment. A modern axiom waiting for a theory…
Juries in criminal cases typically decide if someone is guilty, then a judge determines a suitable level of punishment. New research confirms that these two separate assessments of guilt and punishment – though related – are calculated in different parts of the brain. In fact, researchers have found that they can disrupt and change one…
-
Getting lost. Barriers. Finding your way home…
If you’re ever lost in Los Angeles, just head for the ocean to get your bearings. This advice works because running into the coast — or any other border — can reset an errant internal GPS system, a new study in mice suggests. The results help explain how the brain maintains a high-fidelity map of…
-
Head transplant. Waves. Resonance. Life…
Things didn’t go so great for Victor Frankenstein or his monster, but don’t tell that to Sergio Canavero. The Italian doctor believes that it’s now possible to slice the head of off one person, stitch it to the decapitated body of another, and then reanimate the two-human mash-up. What’s more, he says the first head…
-
Learning machines. Unlearning humans. Void. Arkanoid.
“We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari…
You must be logged in to post a comment.