Lifeboat Foundation

As fun as brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are, for the best results they tend to come with the major asterisk of requiring the cutting and lifting of a section of the skull in order to implant a Utah array or similar electrode system. A non-invasive alternative consists out of electrodes which are placed on the skin, yet at a reduced resolution. These electrodes are the subject of a recent experiment by [Shaikh Nayeem Faisal] and colleagues in ACS Applied NanoMaterials employing graphene-coated electrodes in an attempt to optimize their performance.

Although external electrodes can be acceptable for basic tasks, such as registering a response to a specific (visual) impulse or for EEG recordings, they can be impractical in general use. Much of this is due to the disadvantages of the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ varieties, which as the name suggests involve an electrically conductive gel with the former.

This gel ensures solid contact and a resistance of no more than 5 – 30 kΩ at 50 Hz, whereas dry sensors perform rather poorly at 200 kΩ at 50 Hz with worse signal-to-noise characteristics, even before adding in issues such as using the sensor on a hairy scalp, as tends to be the case for most human subjects.

Neuralace™ is a glimpse of what’s possible in the future of BCI.

This patent pending concept technology is the start of Blackrock’s journey toward whole-brain data capture–with transformative potential for the way neurological disorders are treated. With over 10,000 channels and a flexible lace structure that seamlessly conforms to the brain, Neuralace has potential applications in vision and memory restoration, performance prediction, and the treatment of mental health disorders like depression.

Continue reading “Neuralace™ | The next-generation of BCI and whole-brain data capture” »

Blackrock’s long-tested NeuroPort® Array, widely considered the gold standard of high-channel neural interfacing, has been used in human BCIs since 2004 and powered many of the field’s most significant milestones. In clinical trials, patients using Blackrock’s BCI have regained tactile function, movement of their own limbs and prosthetics, and the ability to control digital devices, despite diagnoses of paralysis and other neurological disorders.

While Blackrock’s BCI enables patients to execute sophisticated functions without reliance on assistive technologies, next-generation BCIs for areas such as vision and memory restoration, performance prediction, and treatment of mental health disorders like depression will need to interface with more neurons.

Neuralace is designed to capitalize on this need; with 10,000+ channels and the entire scalable system integrated on an extremely flexible lace-structured chip, it could capture data that is orders of magnitude greater than existing electrodes, allowing for an exponential increase in capability and intuitiveness.

A book talk by:

Robert Stickgold, PhD

Continue reading “When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep” »

Resolving activity in cortical columns and cortical layers in the human brain with ultra-high field fMRI — new insights for biological models of cognitive functions.
Speaker: Rainer Goebel, Maastricht University, Netherlands.

HBP School — The Human Brain Atlas: Neuroscientific basis, tools and applications.
3–7 September 2018
Düsseldorf/Jülich, Germany.
Maastricht, Netherlands.

Continue reading “Goebel Rainer — Resolving activity in cortical columns and cortical layers in the human brain (…)” »

A recent study has suggested that transcriptomes may be the best method for classifying different types of brain disease.

When we look at something, the different properties of the image are processed in different brain regions. But how does our brain make a coherent image out of such a fragmented representation? A new review by Pieter Roelfsema sheds light on two existing hypotheses in the field.

When we open our eyes, we immediately see what is there. The efficiency of our vision is a remarkable achievement of evolution. The introspective ease with which we perceive our visual surroundings masks the sophisticated machinery in our brain that supports visual perception. The image that we see is rapidly analyzed by a complex hierarchy of cortical and subcortical brain regions.

Neurons in low level brain regions extract basic features such as line orientation, depth and the color of local image elements. They send the information to several mid-level brain areas. Neurons in these areas code for other features, such as motion direction, color and shape fragments.

Do you remember learning to drive a car? You probably fumbled around for the controls, checked every mirror multiple times, made sure your foot was on the brake pedal, then ever-so-slowly rolled your car forward.

Fast forward to now and you’re probably driving places and thinking, “how did I even get here? I don’t remember the drive”. The task of driving, which used to take a lot of mental energy and concentration, has now become subconscious, automatic—habitual.

But how—and why—do you go from concentrating on a task to making it automatic?

Brains are like puzzles, requiring many nested and co-dependent pieces to function well. The brain is divided into areas, each containing many millions of neurons connected across thousands of synapses. These synapses, which enable communication between neurons, depend on even smaller structures: message-sending boutons (swollen bulbs at the branch-like tips of neurons), message-receiving dendrites (complementary branch-like structures for receiving bouton messages), and power-generating mitochondria. To create a cohesive brain, all these pieces must be accounted for.

However, in the aging brain, these pieces can get lost or altered, and no longer fit in the greater brain puzzle. A research team has now published a study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on this topic.

“Fifty percent of people experience loss of working memory with old age, meaning their ability to hold and manipulate information in the short-term decreases,” says co-first author Courtney Glavis-Bloom, a senior staff scientist in Salk Institute Professor John Reynolds’s lab. “We set out to understand why some individuals maintain healthy working memory as they age, while others do not. In the process, we discovered a novel mechanism for the synaptic basis of cognitive impairment.”