This morning I watched a bird — I believe a finch — in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4″ hole for a front door.

This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well.

Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.

Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place:

It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates.

Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.”

Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.

“Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a powerful non-invasive tool widely used in both medical diagnosis and neurobiological research because it provides high temporal resolution in milliseconds which directly reflects the dynamics of the generating cell assemblies, and it is the only brain imaging modality that does not require the head/body to be fixed.” — Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience

This is too good for Researchers and Developers to not give them the free advertising.

“The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.”

Take advantage of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset to conduct EEG research. Join the Emotiv Research Community by licensing an Emotiv Software Development Kit (SDK) for research.

“The games application includes the first three games that have been developed: Emotipong, Cererbral Constructor, and Jedi Mind Trainer (WingRaise). Cortex Arcade will allow you to control the three games included using the Emotiv Epoc neuroheadset.”

With Neurokey, ThinkTyping works.

Remarks below about Neurokey from Russell Abbott, 02/03/2010 10:37:39

“I was thinking you could include predictive text mode, in a similar way to mobile phones. Reduce the number of keys and use a detection for each key.”

“This way you could type a message a lot easier with cognitiv. I use predictive all the time on my phone and I am able bodied, without it is a real pain. So I imagine typing individual letters by gyro, cognitiv or expressiv would be quite frutstrating for a disabled person.”

How to map a 1GB per mm² intracranial mushdrive and other empirically based explanatory spelunking.

Don’t worry, there will be no quiz, because we can tell whether or not you’re paying attention and fMRI whether or not you get it. ;-)

Marty Sereno: “The strange sort of reality of the visual system, from which you reconstruct and construct this static feeling of stuff out there is this sequence of [really bizarre, fisheye lens distorted looking, scanning, zooming] glances. Somehow, you actually assemble that series of glances into a meaningful, coherent, representation of the room.”

So what differentiates our brains from animal brains, which are otherwise so strikingly, anatomically similar?

Marty Sereno: “They don’t have a productive way of attaching up a symbol stream to this visual scene assembler, that they otherwise just use for assembling the current visual scene. So the theory is basically that, this final stage just requires some more rapid way of allowing auditory symbols which didn’t mean anything, or evolved for essentially meaninglessness and just sort of because they sounded good, essentially attaching them up to the higher level parts of the visual system where this scene assembly process goes on normally, with respect to the current scene. So that’s my theory.”

Conclusions:

• Preadaptation 1: vocal control by sexual selection
• Preadaptation 2: serial assembly of glances
• Language is not an isolated organ in the brain, but instead largely built upon existing functionality
• The ability to evoke fictive scenes leads to a great increase in cognitive power (evoking past, future)
• The final stage in this scenario only requires the development of stronger auditory/visual mapping

• Explore.
• Learn.

UI’s for the coming decade from Six Revisions.

At Caltech, “our cybernetic implant options draw nearer (and more intelligent).”

Get ready, it’s all coming together and now is the time to gently prepare the normals for what’s next; even if it’s by way of the equivalent of visual nursery rhymes and benign Olympic sideshows, for now.

Winter Olympics to demo lighting controlled by thoughts

So imagine what we’re not showing you, yet.

Image: Kotaku

One of the projects being developed by the group is a form of assistive technology they call a brain co-processor. This system, also referred to as a cognitive assistive system, would initially be aimed at people suffering from cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. It would monitor people’s activities and brain functions, determine when they needed help, and provide exactly the right bit of helpful information at just the right time. It could also find applications for people without any disability, as a form of brain augmentation.

SOURCES: MIT via KAI

“Who knows? Maybe, in another ten years, we’ll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant.” — Pattie Maes

Is it merely cheesy pop pseudo science …

“The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Since Einstein uses the term particle to represent “matter,” he is acknowledging that the field controls our physical reality.

… or a somewhat useful intermediate abstraction on the way to more precise understanding …

“Epigenetics has become much more interesting because it allows us to look at how gene expression is changed by environmental events, explainable in part by histone modifications.”

Wired:

The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas.

Embedded in Contact Lenses with Built-In Virtual Graphics might minimize power requirements:

One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.