Category Archives: Brain

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What The Internet Is Doing to Your Brain

May 8th, 2013 | Brain

Internet Brain

Internet Brain

Ever since I started a full-time job working at a computer, I feel like my brain has gone a bit haywire.  My attention span seems shorter every day, I check a myriad of iPhone apps every 20 minutes (without much reason), and I can hardly get through a task from start to finish. I believe this is all directly attributed to my perpetual online status.

The “3 minutes on the Internet” highlighted at the beginning of this video perfectly describes the scatter brain feeling I get with endless connection to information.  Of course, I’m happy to learn everything there is to know about the violent behavior of panda bears or toilet paper orientation (DON’T CLICK THAT!), and this breadth of knowledge is great at cocktail or dinner parties, but the depth of knowledge is often sacrificed.

So what do can do about this problem?

Well, I think one good solution is to disconnect from time to time.  Print off a long article you plan to read and get away from the computer for an hour or so.  This will help with the next step…

Commit your attention.  Resist any and all urges to check email, facebook, reddit, or RobotSpaceBrain until a task is completed.  In time, this should get easier as your brain adjusts to a new level of focus.

Exercise & Practice Meditation.  Clearing your mind from the hustle of daily life is essential for well-being. Exercise has been linked to increased attention in several studies. I have never practiced meditation, but I’ve heard it can do the same.

The whole point isn’t that there’s something inherently wrong with the Internet, but I would recommend taking a moment to reflect on how it’s affecting you.  Maybe you can adjust your usage to find a little more zen in your life.  I sure hope I can.

-RSB

[via Gizmodo]

Guillotine Simulator using Virtual Reality

May 7th, 2013 | Brain, Robot

guillotine-16th-century

Guillotine-Simulator-1

In case you didn’t know, a guillotine is a French execution device consisting of an angled metal blade that falls on your neck and chops your head off.  For the first time, you can experience what this might be like using the most state-of-the-art virtual reality headset called Oculus Rift. The Guillotine Simulator is appropriately named Disunion.

The idea is that you can look around at the blade, the crowd of onlookers cheering on your death, and then when the executioner gives the signal, the blade is dropped, and your head rolls to the floor.  The experience is enhanced by having a friend briskly chop your neck at the moment of impact.

I would love to give this a try.

Interesting note:

“During the span of its usage, the French guillotine has gone by many names, some of which include these:

  • La Monte-à-regret (The Regretful Climb)
  • Le Rasoir National (The National Razor)
  • Le Vasistas or La Lucarne (The Fanlight)
  • La Veuve (The Widow)
  • Le Moulin à Silence (The Silent Mill)
  • Louisette or Louison (from the name of prototype designer Antoine Louis)
  • Madame La Guillotine
  • Mirabelle (from the name of Mirabeau)
  • La Bécane (The Machine)
  • Le Massicot (The Cutter)
  • La Cravate à Capet (The Necktie of Capet, Capet being Louis XVI)
  • La Raccourcisseuse Patriotique (The Patriotic Shortener)
  • La demi-lune (The Half-Moon)
  • Les Bois de Justice (Wooden Justice)
  • La Bascule à Charlot (Charlot’s Rocking-chair)
  • Le Prix Goncourt des Assassins (The Goncourt Prize for Murderers)

In other countries, it was called by other names:

  • the Halifax Gibbet (England)
  • the Scottish Maiden (Scotland)
  • Fallbeil (Germany)”

“The Machine” and “Wooden Justice” are pretty good.

-RSB

Brains Made from Household Objects

May 2nd, 2013 | Brain

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household-brain-3

Kyle Bean has a way with organizing household items into intriguing designs.  In this recent project for Men’s Health Magazine, he transformed toothpaste, fruit, and newspapers into the undulating gyri and sulci of the brain.  I, of course, appreciate any creative representations of the brain, but I find these particularly well done.
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-RSB

[via Colossal]

Graphic Design from Maiko Gubler

April 17th, 2013 | Brain, Space

Maiko Gubler

Maiko Gubler

Maiko Gubler

The Swiss-Japanese artist Maiko Gubler belongs to the creative group in Berlin, originally moving to Germany because she was “charmed by the rawness, the undefined space and the inherent history of Berlin in the 90s.”  She works in a variety of mediums — illustration, sculpture, 3D modeling, and graphic design — and all of it is well crafted.
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The images above are fantastically crisp, driven by blue skies, clean lines, and bright tile.
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The melting metal reminds me of gallium, which will turn liquid in your hand (at 29.76 °C  / 85.57 °F to be exact).

Find more from Maiko here.

-RSB

[via But Does It Float]

Skeleton Car from Li Hui

April 15th, 2013 | Brain, Robot

Skeleton Car 1

Skeleton-Car-2

Skeleton-Car-3

Li Hui is a Chinese Installation artist who works with stainless steel, acrylics and lasers.  The skeleton car above was created in 2006 for a show titled “Who’s afraid of red, amber, and green?” – a direct reference to the painting series “Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue” by American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman.

The installation (named ‘Amber’) features a full size horse skeleton, which has been etched into the acrylic race car to create a truly ethereal scene.

Jérôme Sans (director of the UCCA) writes that “Li Hui’s works explore questions of life and death, existence and transcendence, materiality and spirituality, technology and humanity. But it is his penchant for melding the organic and the inorganic that foreshadows a world in which mortal and machine have become one, making people indistinguishable from their tools.”

Here are the other two pieces from the show, “Reincarnation” and “Cage”:

Reincarnation-Li-Hui

Ausstellung "Cage"

Light is not a usual medium in artwork, but artists such as James Turrell have shown that it can be mastered.

In Li Hui’s own words… “Light doesn’t seem like a material that can be used in art – if you do not handle it well, the outcome will be awful. Everyone can use light in their work, but light may not always be a good material to help them express what they want to express.”

I’ll look forward to more futuristic works from Li Hui.

-RSB

[via My Amp Goes to 11]

See-Through Brain Developed

April 10th, 2013 | Brain

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See-Through Brain Development

The world’s very first See-Through Brain has been developed by a team at Stanford University led by Karl Deisseroth (M.D., Ph.D.).  Deisseroth is well-known for his critical role in the development of Optogenetics, a tool used to control individual neurons with light.  Optogenetics is normally limited to surface neurons because the light has trouble reaching deeper areas, but the see-through brain may greatly enhance its efficacy.

The new method (termed CLARITY) involves removing the fat that provides structure but also blocks light.  The brain is soaked in a chemical that forms a nanoporous hydrogel-hybridized mesh in the brain.  This mesh can then support all the tissue so the fat can be washed away, resulting in the incredible see-through brain.

Unfortunately, the new technique can’t be used in living animals, but it still represents a huge advancement for neuroanatomists.  No longer will there be much need to cut the brain into tiny slices (an extremely time-consuming process) to observe connectivity.

The announcement comes just a week after President Barack Obama announced a $100 million BRAIN initiative, and this new step forward surely offers a taste of the sort of technological breakthroughs the initiative hopes to achieve.

And all the Leaders in Neuroscience seem to be weighing in on this one:

“I can’t make any official statement, but I can say that this is exactly the type of technology one would hope to develop for the [BRAIN] project” – Dr. Michelle Freund, a program manager with the National Institutes of Mental Health

“If the entire mouse brain is transparent, that makes a very large fraction of neuroscience research much easier”  – Dr. R. Clay Reid of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

This technique “is a giant step forward from having to slice the mouse brain into 1,000 pieces and looking at them each individually, then trying to reconstruct the relationships of all those slices” – Dr. Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, a co-leader of Obama’s brain initiative.

“It’s exactly the technique everyone’s been waiting for”- Dr. Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute.

Karl_Deisseroth_Stanford

 Karl Deisseroth, mastermind of the CLARITY technique

It is certainly an exciting time to be a Neuroscientist.

You can find the full article here.

-RSB

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