Newsome Wants Electrode In Own Brain

Stanford Neuroscientist Bill Newsome wants to implant an electrode in his own brain to study consciousness in ways that would be difficult with volunteer human subjects.

When considered alongside the story of Kevin Warwick who had a 100-electrode array implanted in his arm in 2002 in order to study electrical signals from his hand, one must wonder: is this a starting trend?

From the article:

TR: Do you really want to do this?

BN: Well, I’ve thought about it very carefully. I’ve talked to neurosurgeons, both in the United States and outside the country where the regulatory environment is less strict, about how practical and risky it is. If the risk of serious postsurgical complications was one in one hundred, I wouldn’t do it. If it was one in one thousand, I would seriously consider doing it. To my chagrin, most surgeons estimate the risk to be somewhere in between my benchmarks.

–Stephen

The Most Dangerous Idea (Apparently)

So, Edge has a new question for 2006 for its All-Stars of Academia to answer: What is your dangerous idea? (Suggested to Edge by Steven Pinker, who perhaps got the idea from a colloquium series at his old haunting grounds.)

Offhand, one might expect a broad range of perceived dangerous ideas, varying by research interests and such. What’s surprising is that many of the luminaries think that the “most dangerous idea” is this particular, same idea: As neuroscience progresses, popular realization that the “astonishing hypothesis” — that mind is brain — will create a potentially cataclysmic upheaval of society as we know and have profound (negative) moral implications as people claim less responsibility for their actions.

Of course, this just isn’t true. But, would you believe that
Paul Bloom,
VS Ramachandran,
John Horgan,
Andy Clark,
Marc Hauser,
Clay Shirky,
Eric Kandel,
John Allen Paulos,
and, in a more genetic context, Jerry Coyne and Craig Venter
are all very worried about this issue? (And I didn’t even read 50% of the Edge dangerous ideas… there might be even more… ) Is this really the most dangerous idea out there to all of these talented thinkers?

I feel strongly that science and morality have always been separate domains and that any worry that, by “debunking” the mind, we automatically become immoral machines is just ridiculous. Through this scientific knowledge, we might gain some humility, maybe better see our close relatedness to nonhuman primates and place in nature, etc., but we’re not going to flip out and become crazed zombies. This just isn’t going to happen.

Does anybody else think that this just isn’t a truly dangerous idea (although certainly an “astonishing” one, in the Crick sense)? Or am I wrong here?

Samples of academic worrying after the jump.

Do babies have synaesthesia?

Maurer, D., & Mondloch, C. Neonatal synesthesia: A re-evaluation. In L. Robertson & N. Sagiv (Eds.), Attention on Synesthesia: Cognition, Development and Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 193-213.

This article postulates that babies experience synaesthesia.

I’m not convinced of that hypothesis because (although I only skimmed the article), I couldn’t find any evidence of something that infants and synaesthetes do that non-synaesthetes do not do. But it still reviews some interesting facts.

There are apparently a number of tasks that demonstrate, to quote the article, “paradoxical evidence of U-shaped development of cross-modal perception: Babies demonstrated successful linking of information across sensory modalities near birth, failed at similar tasks later in infancy, and then appeared to gradually learn cross-modal links in the second half of the first year of life.”

The article also reviews evidence for mysterious, presumably innate cross-modal correspondences in normal adults. For example, high frequency sounds go together with lighter colors. Angular shapes go with aggression, strongness, and loudness. Brighter light goes with loudness.

Hypnosis can stop Stroop effect

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis – New York Times

Very interesting stuff. Subjects were hypnotized and told that days later they would see “gibberish” symbols printed in particular colors. They needed to report back the color that the word appeared in. (For those unfamiliar, the Stroop test presents color words, like “red”, in a different color, such as the word “red” written with green ink. People have difficulty reporting the color of the word because we have a strong need to “read” the written word.)

The highly hypnotizable subjects (grouped according to a predetermined measure) essentially showed no Stroop effect (ie. no reaction time difference with conflicting word and color). And, with fMRI, they saw that normally activated visual-reading areas were not activated in these subjects.

His Holiness's Message: Better living through chemicals (or electrodes)

His Holiness has spoken. He wants neuro-drugs to take and electrodes stuck in his brain so that he doesn’t have to spend hours meditating each day. (Enlightenment now!) If you want to do hot stuff, study physics or brain science. His interest in neuroscience stems from a long-standing interest in body hair. Yes, body hair. Americans need to figure their own way through this whole intelligent design business. Not all antidepressants are alike; for instance, the Dalai Lama is against tranquilizers. Definitely against tranquilizers. And, perhaps most surprisingly, His Holiness, approves of animal research — when it’s done right and with respect.

Minute-by-minute liveblog follows after the jump.

Review: Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near

Although Bayle and I are always surprised when we see how many people are actually reading Neurodudes every day (“you really like us! you really do!”), I think we realized we had hit a new milestone when Ray Kurzweil’s book agent called to give us an advance copy of his new book. Let me be clear here: We will gladly review any AI-/neuro-related books you send us. Free books are great! (Heck, we’ll even do an occasional historical biography, if you send us one.)

There’s a lot to say about Kurzweil”s new book, The Singularity is Near (book website; book on Amazon). This book is similar to his previous books (Age of Intelligent Machines, Age of Spiritual Machines) in style and research but the thesis here is that we are on the precipice of a major change in human civilization: We are soon going to create entities of superior intelligence in all aspects to our own selves. This is the Singularity.

Full book review after the jump

You can't argue with a zombie

A funny and insightful philosophy article by Jaron Lanier about consciousness and the possibility of “zombies”, i.e. humans who act like the rest of us but who aren’t conscious.

http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/lanier_zombie.html

Neural Synchrony, Axonal Path Lengths, and General Anesthesia: A Hypothesis

The way that general anesthetics work is still somewhat mysterious. Here’s one intriguing hypothesis.

Anesthetics increase conduction velocity in myelinated fibers. Perhaps they disrupt the carefully calibrated timing of axonal transmission. This may selectively interfere with spike timing-based computation, while leaving rate-based computation intact. If consciousness (or some general class of higher-order functions) is spike timing based, but lower-order functions are rate-based, this would explain why anesthetics selectively affect higher-order functions.

Swindale, Nicholas V. Neural Synchrony, Axonal Path Lengths, and General Anesthesia: A Hypothesis. Neuroscientist 2003 9: 440-445

I didn’t read the article yet (I don’t have access privs to that journal), but it looks cool.

(related NeuroWiki page: GeneralAnesthesia)

Koch's new consciousness book

Jeremy Wolfe has written a review of Christof Koch’s new book on consciousness. This one seems directed more toward the casual reader.

Review is here.

Attention influences perception

Really elegant study in Nature Neuroscience showing how attention (consciousness for you philosophers…) can modulate perception. Most previous work that I’ve seen has been about how attention changes response time but this study shows how the percept itself can change.

The neat part is that the experimenters found a way of assaying stimulus salience (contrast, in this case) without directly asking. It’s interesting to see how this “Holy Grail of Consciousness” is being scientifically deconstructed bit-by-bit with rather simple experiments. Check out the full article here or click below for the news & views.