Researchers from Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs have created a new brain analysis technology that can recontruct images inside of a person's mind and then display them on a monitor. The researchers want to try to view the contents of dreams in the future.
Sounds like either the journalist or the scientist is exaggerating their findings, but I could be wrong. I just have a hard time believing this could be possible. Here's how they are claiming to do it:
'The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.'
The researchers also discuss applying the technology to reading feelings and complicated emotional states, but may have a difficult time displaying these things on a monitor.
The blog 'Pink Tentacle' says that this research is in the December 11 issue 'Neuron', but I haven't been able to find it.
lolwut? more later... Update - this is being reported about all over the place now. Scientific American also uses Pink Tentacle as a source, but claim that the scientists have 'reported it' to the journal 'Neuron', not that 'Neuron' has published anything about it. Big difference. We'll see where this goes.
There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”
Michael Persinger is a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is
that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's
feverish activities. He has attempted to create experiments to show that when the right hemisphere of the brain
is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere is called
upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates what is felt as a 'sensed presence.'
Many of Persinger's studies detail the reactions that people have when their temporal lobes are stimulated with complex magnetic fields. Some of the subjects experience a 'sensed presence' in the form of the deity from the culture that they were raised in. They see the God (or spirits associated with their God - the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, etc) that they believe in. Others have had experiences that mimic the feeling that one would have during alien/UFO visitation - these people tend to be more agnostic.
In 2003 the BBC arranged for Prof. Richard Dawkins to be a subject in one of Persinger's experiments.
There are sites on the net that claim to teach the ability, there's an International Remote Viewing Association that even has conferences (there's one starting on October 19th, apparently), the US government has funded research in it (in the 1970's), we've even had customers buy our mind machines to help them with remote viewing and claim great success. I've never had any type of experiences that are anything like remote viewing - and I'm not sure that I believe that it is even possible - but I'm open to the idea.
What is it? I think a simple explanation for it is just the ability for an individual to descibe locations not yet visited. The CIA and the US Army spent millions of dollars on researching remote viewing and other parapsychological activities and dubbed it 'Star Gate'. They began the program in 1970 (then called SCANATE - good thing they changed the name to something that sounded cooler) at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Ca. This program continued in different forms using both soldiers and civilians who were believed to posess natural psychic abilities for over 24 years.
The remote viewing program was shut down by the CIA in 1994 because they were convinced that remote viewing was of no practical value to the intelligence community.
What is a sketpic supposed to believe? (That's a trick question) There is so much controversy surrounding the people in these programs, the programs themselves, the data from the programs, etc etc etc - that there really isn't anything to go off of. Unfortunately there have been no peer reviewed studies that prove that remote viewing is a reality. darn. Research the links below and see what you think.
Tor Wagner from Columbia University (and colleagues) used an fMRI study to what parts of the brain are activated when patients experience the placebo effect.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of Wagner discussion the team's findings.
Prof. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL in Switzerland have been doing research on the neural-correlates of out-of-body-experiences since at least 2002. This new study is very unusual, as they claim to be able to produce an out-of-body-experience when the user of special goggles is shown a projected image of themselves while being poked with a stick.
Out-of-body experiences are most common in people who endure intense meditation practices, experience sleep paralysis, and following certain types of head injuries. Research such as this strives to discover exactly how the brain creates the out-of-body-experience sensation.
It is arguable whether these experiencies re-produce bona-fide NBE's, but it is an interesting effect nonetheless.
NewScientist just posted a video to YouTube featuring Olaf's group inducing out-of-body-experiences:
The New York Times just published an
article in their science section about 'priming effects'.
Psychological priming happens when subconscious stimuli can affect
our conscious choices. They discuss a few experiments, related
neuroscience research and more.
