The brain looks forward
The brain takes nearly one tenth of a second to consciously register a scene. But the scenery changes far more quickly than that when we move. How does our brain cope? By constantly predicting the future, posits Mark Changizi, now at Rensselaer Polytechnic University.
[See pdf for illustration and the rest of the text.]
Researchers in the United Kingdom are trying to help amputees speed up the process of getting used to prostheses by harnessing a well-known illusion.
In the “rubber hand” illusion, a person’s hand and an adjacent rubber hand are both brushed gently. The real hand is kept out of sight. Before long, the subject’s brain creates a new spatial link, imagining that the sensation in the real hand is arising where the rubber hand is.
Graduate student Matthew Mulvey of Leeds Metropolitan University has now shown that the effect will work if the researchers deliver transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) not to the hidden hand but to the wrist. After being primed with the illusion, subjects perceive the impulses–which hijack the nerve pathways between hand and brain–as a tingling located in the rubber hand. The researchers predict that with an amputee, a TENS signal from above the site of amputation would seem to come from the fake limb.
The team, which showed its results at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition last week, hopes TENS can help amputees adapt faster to prostheses and possibly counter phantom limb pain, a major problem. Kate MacIver, a research nurse at the Pain Research Institute at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., says the idea is “harmless, … so it’s worth a try.”
Originally appeared in Science Magazine as a Random Sample: [html] [pdf]
Researchers have devised a treatment that mechanically repairs burst cell membranes in the brain, somewhat like puncture sealants used in bicycle tyres, and could therefore help to avert brain damage after serious head injuries.
Brain-injured rats that are injected with a polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG) soon after their injuries recover certain behavioural abilities better than untreated rats, report researchers in this week’s Journal of Biological Engineering. Continue reading Cellular ‘puncture repair kit’ may minimize brain trauma
Tony Kouzarides tells the story of his early career as a comedy of errors. He started his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. in 1981 studying the cancer-inducing potential of human cytomegalovirus. After a year of inserting part of the virus’s DNA into target cells, the cells showed almost no signs of cancer. He couldn’t rule out that other parts of the virus might do it, but he also couldn’t publish his early results. What he could publish by the end had more to do with genetic sequencing, an area he did not want to pursue.
After a short postdoc at Cambridge sequencing cytomegalovirus, he landed a second postdoc in a lab in New York studying oncogenes. There, he spent 2 years developing an unconfirmed and unpublishable hunch. On the strength of that record, he deadpans, he unsuccessfully applied to lead his own research group.
Continue reading Creativity and Persistence Overcome Failure