Scottingham - Slashdot User

Submission + - 'Giant' Neuron Modulates 50,000 Other Neurons (medicalxpress.com) 1

Submitted by Scottingham on Friday May 13, 2011 @02:42PM

Scottingham writes: PhsyOrg describes this discovery better than I could: A single "giant", non-spiking, GABAergic interneuron forms an all-to-all negative feedback loop with a population of about 50,000 Kenyon cells, principal neurons of the mushroom bodies, a structure involved in olfactory memory in the insect brain. This normalizing feedback loop serves to ensure relatively constant sparseness of mushroom body output across varying input strengths. Sparseness is an important feature of sensory representations in areas involved in memory formation.

Submission + - Brain-Computer Interface Works With Speech Centers (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Scottingham on Thursday April 07, 2011 @02:59PM

Scottingham writes: Science Daily reports on new research that uses electrodes placed in the speech centers of the brain to move a cursor around the screen. While participants were instructed to utter different vowel sounds their neural activity was parsed and analyzed. Once analyzed and connected to a cursor-control program, participants quickly learned to use the different vowel sounds to move a cursor around a screen. The system can distinguish between actual speech and the cursor-controlling thought-sounds.

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