All van Gogh's

Van Gogh Self Portraits The world famous artist Vincent Van Gogh was well known for his self portraits. Here are a bunch of them in one video clip.

Nick !!

Just look at this movie. Watch...and learn what hope and courage is all about.

Pointillisme: to the point

A very nice post on Cognitive daily about the visual illusion that explains the attractiveness of those kind of paintings. Very nice Blog !!! Cognitive daily ! A must visit.

Will it ever end ?

Use NIRS for gaming and get rid of Your Lazybrain. The Sky is the limit. oncentrate !! Think !! Shunt some blood to Your 10 forward and get going...

Cybertherapy in Agoraphobia

Nice article
clinical protocol VR treatment of anxiiety - Free Legal Forms

Debunk a galore

Debunk all known urban legends and much more. Snopes !!

Not Your ordinary brain

A picture of the Internet

EcoG

Floating on Your brain: Imagine.... http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1827871101/bctid2651416001

Drive safely untill You crash

This article appeared in Scientific American. Although Cognitive testing is ok a simulator test is much better. refer to STISIM: the best !!! Giving Alzheimer's patients a battery of cognitive tests may help predict whether it's safe for them (and us) to get behind the wheel, according to a new study. "We found that tests that involved visual perception and visual memory were particularly important in preventing driving errors," says Jeffrey Dawson, a biostatistician at the University of Iowa College of Public Health in Iowa City and lead author of the study published in Neurology. Dawson hopes the findings will pave the way for the creation of a test that physicians could give to people diagnosed with Alzheimer's to determine if it’s safe for them to be on the road. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, affects an estimated five million people in the U.S., according to the Alzheimer's Association, a nonprofit based in Chicago, Illinois. The disease appears to be caused by protein plaques and tangles that accumulate in the brain, damaging cells and chipping away at the victim's cognition and motor skills. Dawson compared the driving ability of 40 men and women ages 51 to 89 with early Alzheimer's to 115 drivers ages 42 to 89 with no signs of dementia. (The average age of the Alzheimer's group, 75, was six years older than that of the other group, but the discrepancy was accounted for in the final statistical analysis, Dawson notes). The researchers gave all drivers a series of tests designed to measure cognitive, visual, and motor skills. He says the Alzheimer's patients did worse in virtually all of them. About a month later, each study participant was given a 35-mile road test with a researcher in the passenger seat giving instructions and monitoring performance. The car was also equipped with hidden cameras and specialized sensors to detect changes in acceleration, steering wheel position, and other factors used to assess their performances. The Alzheimer's drivers made an average of 42 errors, including straddling lanes and failing to go immediately after a light turned green, compared with an average of 33 errors in the healthy group (a 20 percent difference). According to Dawson, the results of the combo of cognitive tests accurately predicted how many errors an Alzheimer's driver would commit: 50 points lower on a 400-point overall cognitive score translated to four more safety errors on the road, he says. He notes that the most telling individual exams were the ones requiring patients to recall and draw shapes and figures that researchers had shown them minutes or seconds earlier. The ultimate goal, Dawson says, is to combine the most effective tests into one simple exam that doctors could use during routine office check-ups. By the way, for all of you naysayers out there trying to get granny off the road, take note: People 65 and over account for 15 percent of all licensed drivers in the U.S. but only make up about 8 percent of those injured in accidents (meaning they are involved in far fewer crashes than would be expected), according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). In addition, a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that crash deaths among drivers age 70 and older dipped 21 percent over the past decade. But that's not to say they shouldn't be tested. The feds currently don't mandate special tests to gauge driving fitness among older people, according to NHTSA spokesperson Patricia Oladeinde. But some states impose their own stringent license renewal requirements. The District of Columbia, for instance, requires people 70 and over to present a doctor's note certifying they are physically and mentally up to the task, and in some cases, requires vision and reaction tests.

Yahoo research pad

Neuro-TV

Cool Siftables

Siftables research summary: [to view the TED talk and find contact info click here] Imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then beginning to sort them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, and they utilize all of our fingers and both hands together. We humans are skilled at using our hands in these ways, and can effortlessly sift and sort - focusing on our higher level goals rather than the items themselves. Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

Perfect engineering !!! DARPA Bionic arm

Bionic arm: BCI

No sound

Brain on a Chip and more

TMS video's

Cybertherapy

Math NIC nac

• Parallel ICA Methods for EEG Neuroimaging By: Dan B. Keith, Christian C. Hoge, Robert M. Frank, and Allen D. Malony.

  Published at IPDPS conference 2006.

  Abstract: HiPerSAT, a C++ library and tools, processes EEG data sets with ICA (Independent Component Analysis) methods. HiPerSAT uses BLAS, LAPACK, MPI and OpenMP to achieve a high performance solution that exploits parallel hardware. ICA is a class of methods for analyzing a large set of data samples and extracting independent components that explain the observed data. ICA is used in EEG research for data cleaning and separation of spatiotemporal patterns that may reflect different underlying neural processes. We present two ICA implementations (FastICA and Infomax) that exploit paral lelism to provide an EEG component decomposition solution of higher performance and data capacity than current MATLAB-based implementations. Experimental results and the methodology used to obtain them are presented. Integrating HiPerSAT with EEGLAB [4] is described, as well as future plans for this research.

• Framework for Evaluating ICA Methods of Artifact Removal from Multichannel EEG By: Kevin A. Glass, Gwen A. Frishkoff, Robert M. Frank, Colin Davey, Joseph Dien, Allen D. Malony, and Don M. Tucker.

  Abstract: We present a method for evaluating ICA separation of artifacts from EEG (electroencephalographic) data. Two algorithms, Infomax and FastICA, were applied to "synthetic data," created by superimposing simulated blinks on a blink-free EEG. To examine sensitivity to different data characteristics, multiple datasets were constructed by varying properties of the simulated blinks. ICA was used to decompose the data, and each source was cross-correlated with a blink template. Different thresholds for correlation were used to assess stability of the algorithms. When a match between the blink-template and the decomposition was obtained, the contribution of the source was subtracted from the EEG. Since the original data were known a priori to be blink-free, it was possible to compute the correlation between these "baseline" data and the results of different decompositions. By averaging the filtered data, time-locked to the simulated blinks, we illustrate effects of different outcomes for EEG waveform and topographic analysis.

A new conference is born

The main mission of this newly founded conference is to foster West-East interaction and collaboration in the rapidly advancing clinical use of neuroprosthetics, and the specific aim of the first conference is to expose unique technological and neurological research opportunities in Taiwan. The conference sessions cover several key areas in the neuroprosthetic development, such as deep brain stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s disease, vagal and deep brain stimulation for treatment of epilepsy, devices for hearing, and devices for overcoming muscle paralysis, as well as the microelectrode biocompatibility, and novel microelectrode technologies. Each of the six oral sessions will include a speaker from Taiwan and two international speakers.

Take the right direction

Spatial bias due to hemispheric dominance can influence the outcome of a survey by 27% !! Our bias for the left-hand side of space could be distorting large-scale surveys. Past research has shown that when people are asked to bisect a horizontal line down the centre, most will cross the line too far to the left. This leftward bias is thought to stem from the right hemisphere – it plays a dominant role in allocating our attention and is also responsible for processing the left-hand side of space. It may also be related to a cultural tendency to read from left to right. Now Andrea Loftus and colleagues have reported this spatial bias could be distorting survey results. The researchers presented two groups of students with the same questionnaire statements about their experience at university (e.g. “My course has been enjoyable”), except that one group answered using a 5-item Likert scale that ranged left-to-right, from ‘definitely disagree’ to ‘definitely agree’, whereas the other group answered using a scale that ranged left-to-right across the page, from ‘definitely agree’ to ‘definitely disagree’. The positive questionnaire statements were the same as those used by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in its survey of 250,000 students. In the current study, the students’ natural bias for the left meant those answering using the Likert scale that started on the left with ‘definitely agree’, responded with that answer to 27 per cent more statements than did the other group of students – that is, their views came out as more positive. By contrast, those students who answered using the scale that began on the left with ‘definitely disagree’ responded more often with ‘mostly disagree’, meaning their views came out overall as more negative. The observation has profound implications for surveys, such as that conducted by the HEFCE, that seek respondents’ agreement, or not, with consistently positive or negative statements, and which use the same Likert scale for answers throughout. The researchers said one solution in the future is for the Likert scale direction to be reversed for half of the survey sample.

BCI teams up with ANN in FAU

Video here. Nice idea. The way to go... http://video.news.ufl.edu/20080702-ProsthInterface.mp4

Sad.. Sad ...Story....

So your whole life was set up to be dedicated to research ? huh.. Good ..very good. Working hard to advance science, is it ? Yep !! For the sake of humanity ? of course ! Then you found Yourself filling in papers and moonschine scribbling proposal after proposal. Proposals a galore in order to get those funds. Grants , money .. can't live without them, can we ? Hello ? .. sorry mate. Better read this depressing story first before getting into those muddy waters. No saving belts , here. Alas.

EEG helmet

Video here

If You think statistics are not important..

THINK again !!!! and read this

Grab the free neurostuff

All articles of this number are freely accessible. An they are good quality too.

Brain Facts & Trivia

VISOR NG: next generation ??

Beaune Neurometing 2009: Le VISOR Nouveau est arrivé !! Better put Your internet scanner pointed at this website. New and exciting developments are on the verge to be announced. Those who were present at the Neuromeeting in Beaune already could enjoy a preview. VISOR 2.0 : the future is soon to come...

B.O.W: Brain on Wine

As read on Tim's WineExpert Blog Sensory problems when tasting wine: amateur beware !!

Sensory Evaluation Errors

So if we're not adapting or compressing, it's all good, right? Unfortunately our big juicy primate brains get us into trouble again. Adaptations derived from social hierarchy, or expectations driven by previous experience can push us into sensory errors, including the following: Stimulus error: when irrelevant criteria such as the style or colour or the container (or the product itself) influences the observer. E.g. Wine bottles with cork and screw top on the same product will get differently assessed because of the closure method. Expectation error: Information given with the sample may trigger preconceived ideas. What is expected is usually found. E.g., if five wines in a row have increasing levels of sweetness, the sixth sample will usually be rated as sweeter—even if it isn’t! Enhancement: the effect of the presence of one substance/stimuli increasing the perceived intensity of a second substance/stimuli. E.g., given two identical wine samples, if the acidity in one is increased, the taster will also perceive an increase in fruitiness. Error of habituation: After a while, things all taste the same—never taste more than eight similar samples in one session. Mutual suggestion: The response of a panellist/taster can often be influenced by other panellists. Vocalising an opinion should be prohibited (and the testing area should be free from noise and distraction). Capriciousness and timidity: Some people tend to use the extremes of any scale thereby exerting more than their share of influence over the panel’s results. Others tend to stick to the central part of the scale and to minimise the difference between scales. This effect can occur when you ask for an honest response in front of an authority figure, and can minimise objectivity and honesty. Contrast effect: Presentation of a sample of good quality just before one of poor quality may cause the second sample to receive a lower rating than if it has been rated alone. Group effect: One good sample presented in a group of poor samples will be rated lower than if presented on its own. This effect is the opposite of the contrast effect. Error of central tendency: Samples placed near the centre of a set tend to be preferred over those at the ends. In triangle tests, the odd sample is detected more often if it is in the middle position. Pattern effect: Panellists will use all available clues and are quick to detect any pattern in the order of presentation.

It's amazing we ever agree (or in the case of mutual suggestion, disagree) on anything, given the room for error. But a clear head, along with steps taken to eliminate bias can go a long way to decreasing the error rate of our tasting efforts. But what about our equipment, our noses and tastebuds? We'll look at the gustatory and olfactory systems tomorrow.

Free neuronavigation

neuroscience Soft where ?

Here

Research Blogging

Electric Brain on nanotubes

Soon to be found in a Brain repair workshop near You....

rTMS: neuronavigation

"The use of neuro-navigational methods to target a specific DLPFC site appears to enhance response to rTMS treatment in depression"

An important publication

A Randomized Trial of rTMS Targeted with MRI Based Neuro-Navigation in Treatment-Resistant Depression

Paul B Fitzgerald¹, Kate Hoy¹, Susan McQueen¹, Jerome J Maller¹, Sally Herring¹, Rebecca Segrave¹, Michael Bailey², Greg Been¹, Jayashri Kulkarni¹ and Zafiris J Daskalakis³

1. ¹Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, The Alfred and Monash University School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, Commercial Rd Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2. ²Monash University Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, The Alfred Hospital, Commercial Rd Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
3. ³Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence: Professor PB Fitzgerald, Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, First Floor, Old Baker Building, The Alfred, Commercial Rd Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia. Tel: +61 3 9076 6552; Fax: +61 3 9076 6588; E-mail: paul.fitzgerald@med.monash.edu.au

Received 8 August 2008; Revised 14 December 2008; Accepted 16 December 2008; Published online 14 January 2009.

Top of page

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate whether repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) targeted to a specific site in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), with a neuro-navigational method based on structural MRI, would be more effective than rTMS applied using the standard localization technique. Fifty-one patients with treatment-resistant depression were randomized to receive a 3-week course (with a potential 1-week extension) of high-frequency (10 Hz) left-sided rTMS. Thirty trains (5 s duration) were applied daily 5 days per week at 100% of the resting motor threshold. Treatment was targeted with either the standard 5 cm technique (n=27) or using a neuro-navigational approach (n=24). This involved localizing the scalp location that corresponds to a specific site at the junction of Brodmann areas 46 and 9 in the DLPFC based on each individual subject's MRI scan. There was an overall significant reduction in the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale scores over the course of the trial, and a better outcome in the targeted group compared with the standard localization group at 4 weeks (p=0.02). Significant differences were also found on secondary outcome variables. The use of neuro-navigational methods to target a specific DLPFC site appears to enhance response to rTMS treatment in depression. Further research is required to confirm this in larger samples, or to establish whether an alternate method based on surface anatomy, including measurement from motor cortex, can be substituted for the standard 5 cm method.

RoboLand of hope and glory...

A nice collection is found here