Robust and Non-Invasive Way To Tap, Address and Analyze Brain Activity That Is Optimized For Future Brain-Machine Interaction

New York University (New York, NY) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) scientists in U.S. Patent Application 20100106259 disclose conducting polymer nanowires and methods for their use in a brain-machine interface which is secure, robust and minimally invasive.  A vascular-based brain-machine interface comprising conducting polymer nanowires is disclosed by a inventors, Rodolfo R Llinas (New York, NY), Ian W. Hunter; (Cambridge, MA) and Bryan P. Ruddy (Somerville, MA). The brain-machine interface is based on a nanotechnology/vascular approach which they have developed. The interface has the advantage of being retrievable in that the nano-scale conducting polymer electrodes are small enough so that even with a large number of electrodes (millions), the interface can be removed without violating the integrity of the brain. The system for receiving electrical signals from a biological target using vascular-based probes, includes: a plurality of conducting polymer nanowires, each nanowire having a distal end and a proximal end, and an associated probe portion located at the distal end of each nanowire; the plurality of conducting polymer nanowires being delivered into a vascular territory to be monitored; and an electronic interface circuit in electrical communication with the plurality of conducting...

Read More........→June 09, 2016

We do have a 'grammar' in our head

New York: Ever wondered how we could comprehend even nonsensical phrases? That is because of an "internal grammar" in our head, according to linguist Noam Chomsky's decades-old theory. Now, findings from a new study further support this idea. "One of the foundational elements of Chomsky's work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language," said senior researcher David Poeppel from the New York University. "Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner -- a process that reflects an 'internal grammar' mechanism," Poepple added. The research on Chomsky's 1957 work, posited that we can recognise a phrase such as "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" as both nonsensical and grammatically correct because we have an abstract knowledge base that allows us to make such distinctions even though the statistical relations between words are non-existent. The researchers explored how linguistic units are represented in the brain during speech comprehension. Series of experiments were conducted using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which allows measurements of the tiny magnetic fields generated by brain activity, and electrocorticography (ECoG), a clinical technique used to measure brain...

Read More........→December 13, 2015