Uploading your dreams to Youtube

Jack Gallant of Berkeley and colleagues recently demonstrated how they could use a computer to reconstruct a video image presented to a subject in a functional MRI machine. The work sounds like the stuff of science fiction. It is anything but. The work actually hints at how we might develop a mind-machine interface to allow people with complete paralysis or severe disabilities to communicate their thoughts and control a computer or equipment.

The perhaps more fanciful outcome of later studies in this area might be that we could one day upload our dreams or images from our imagination to Youtube…but that’s probably getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Anyway, I discuss the technical details in my MRI column on SpectroscopyNOW on 1st October.

However, I wanted to ask Gallant more about the validity of the technique, which superficially seems like a statistical trick and not actual imaging of what’s going on in a person’s head. This is what he had to say:

“Thanks for your interest in this work, and on your great article! Our models are validated to much higher standards than most other work in the field. Almost all fMRI studies focus on mere statistical significance. We focus on importance, that is, we focus on maximizing the predictive power of the models. I think it is our focus on predictive power that produces such good models. The model presented in this paper only focuses on the earliest stage of visual processing – primary visual cortex and there is lots of evidence that indicates that the results of studies in this area do not depend much on the subject, and in fact using authors is standard practice for studies in this area. This is a legitimate question, but I have no doubt that the results can be confirmed in others.”

I also probed him about what would be the next step and how others in the field had responded to the work:

“The human brain probably consists of somewhere between 200-500 distinct processing modules, each of which performs a different function. The visual system alone probably includes 50-75 distinct modules. At this time, we only have good computational models of two of these areas. Our focus in past years and in the future is to construct models of as many of these areas as we can.

Everyone has been very positive about the work, though within the field this particular paper is viewed correctly as a natural evolutionary step in computational modelling, rather than a revolutionary step that appears to have emerged de novo. We have been working on projects like this for over a decade, and there are several dozen other laboratories that also engage in quantitative modelling of the visual system. New models emerge all the time.”

In terms of the bulk-scale and low-resolution that is blood flow monitoring using fMRI, even at the capillary level, I was curious as to how this could be comparable to the fine-grained neural activity in the visual cortex:

“I share your skepticism about fMRI, but if it was ‘wholly incomparable’ then nothing that we discover using fMRI would be applicable to the underlying neurons. fMRI measures a complex interaction of blood volume, blood flow rate and blood oxygenation. These are all indirectly coupled to and affected by the aggregate activity of the underlying neuropil. Most of the information available in the underlying neurons is lost in this transformation, but some trace remains. Furthermore, brain activity signals measured using fMRI are contaminated by other non-neural factors, such as changes in blood pressure and the distribution of the veins. One must be very careful in interpreting the results of any fMRI study, and one must always keep in mind that the method tends toward Type II error.

The goal of this work is to build an accurate ENcoding model that accurately describes how the spatio-temporal features in natural movies are reflected in brain activity measured using fMRI, and which can accurately predict the activity elicited by new movies not used to build the model. The fact that such ENcoding models can be converted into DEcoding models and used for reconstructions is really just a byproduct of Bayes theorem. If we build an accurate encoding model, we get decoding essentially for free.

Research Blogging IconNishimoto, S., Vu, A., Naselaris, T., Benjamini, Y., Yu, B., & Gallant, J. (2011). Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.031

The 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes

UPDATE: In the spirit of structured procrastination, I got the blog post done, important bit, but the more important bit was to add a link to the ceremony video, you can find that here.

The Ig Nobel Prizes reward scientific achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. The 2011 ceremony was filled with coffee, chemistry, opera singers and paper aeroplanes, apparently. And awards went to: Failed Doomsday Predictions, Beer-Loving Beetles, Effects of a Full Bladder on Decision-Making, The ‘Theory of Structured Procrastination’, and the Wasabi Fire Alarm. Watch the weird promo:

The Ig’s organisers provide a full listing of the winners at Improbable Research not surprisingly. Great to see Perry’s “Structured Procrastination” theory rewarded, something I’ve been experimenting with since I first started writing to deadlines!

The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize winners:

PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE
Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of The Netherlands, Hungary, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of Austria) and Ludwig Huber (of Austria) for their study ‘No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.’
REFERENCE: ‘No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria,’ Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, Ludwig Huber, Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE
Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of Japan, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
REFERENCE: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. Filing date: Feb 5, 2009.

MEDICINE PRIZE
Mirjam Tuk (of The Netherlands and the UK), Debra Trampe (of The Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (of Belgium). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of Australia) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things when they have a strong urge to urinate.
REFERENCE: ‘Inhibitory spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,’ Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-633.

REFERENCE: ‘The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,’ Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE
Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
REFERENCE: ‘Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task,’ Karl Halvor Teigen, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49—57.

LITERATURE PRIZE
John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
REFERENCE: ‘How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done,’ John Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996. Later republished elsewhere under the title ‘Structured Procrastination.’ < http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry>

BIOLOGY PRIZE
Darryl Gwynne (of Canada and Australia and the USA) and David Rentz (of Australia and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.
REFERENCE: ‘Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera),’ D.T. Gwynne, and D.C.F. Rentz, Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, vol. 22, 1983, pp. 79-80.
REFERENCE: ‘Beetles on the Bottle,’ D.T. Gwynne and D.C.F. Rentz, Antenna: Proceedings (A) of the Royal Entomological Society London, vol. 8, no. 3, 1984, pp. 116-7.

PHYSICS PRIZE
Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of France), and Herman Kingma (of The Netherlands), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t.
REFERENCE: ‘Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning,’ Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma, Acta Oto-laryngologica, vol. 120, no. 3, March 2000, pp. 390—5.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE
Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE PRIZE
Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.
VIDEO:

PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE
John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
REFERENCE: ‘The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving,’ John W. Senders, et al., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. 15-33.

JoVE around the world

JoVE is hoping to address scientific information inequality across the globe and has now made free subscriptions to Journal of Visualized Experiments through the HINARI initiative to developing nations in South America, Asia and Africa.

JoVE was originally developed to increase productivity in biological research, and is the only science video journal indexed in PubMed so far. The journali publishes video articles demonstrating advanced experiments performed in major laboratories (including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale).

According to it creators: “Seeing experiments, rather than translating text, saves scientists and students time and money when learning new research techniques.” They add that, “Access to this visual content is especially important in developing countries.”

JoVE for the devloping world.

SAD? Try BLT!

We just passed the Autumnal Equinox, so time for some illuminating words for the wintery days ahead.

There’s a world of difference between being generally grumpy and full on clinical depression. Those who are moderately miffed do not need any treatment but a swift figurative kick to the backside and a brisk walk in the countryside or on a beach to get them back on track. Sufferers of the very real problem of depression, and its even more worrying cousin bipolar disorder (still commonly referred to as manic depression), need something less figurative, pharmaceutical intervention, usually to alleviate, or at least control, symptoms.

Then there is the fairly modern notion of the winter blues, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) as the medicalisationists prefer. What is it exactly? Many people don’t enjoy the “drawing in of the nights” as winter encroaches and the long, dark months of November through February with their significantly foreshortened periods of reduced solar luminance are enough to make anyone miserable. But, do humans somehow need exposure to full-spectrum daylight to be happy? There is a whole medical devices industry growing out of the notion that we do and it promotes desklamps that offer to light up your life, during the dark days, in ways that a conventional incandescent bulb, compact fluorescent tube or LED array simply cannot do.

I was intrigued then when a Cambridge-based company, Lumie, sent me a 55-Watt desk lamp that gives off bright “white” light with claims of treating SAD. To be honest, I don’t know if I suffer from SAD or indeed whether it is a real clinical condition, the list of symptoms is so long and overlaps so spuriously with any number of other “conditions” that I suspect SAD is a myth, especially as they talk about summertime SAD now too!

However, I do prefer the long, bright days of summer to the short stumpy bursts of sunlight we get in the Winter, but does that make me a sufferer? Lumie, the company that sent me the lamp to review, included a fairly simple questionnaire with the lamp that asks about depression symptoms, eating habits, weight gain and sex life as well as waking patterns. You’re to tot up your score on each question from 0 to 5 to determine whether you suffer from SAD (it’s more like a magazine-style Q&A than anything that would give scientifically valid data in a clinical trial, I feel). Then, you’re meant to fill in the questionnaire again after several periods of lamp use.

The 2 x 24 Watt bulbs used in the device are Made in China (and branded as ZLamp CF-L 24W/865)  just look like standard short mercury-vapour fluorescent tubes to me. They are bright. They are also quick to start up and so far flicker free. I don’t see anything on the manufacturer’s site to suggest there is anything particularly special about their CF-L tubes. The light spectrum emitted from fluorescent lamps is produced by a combination of light directly emitted by the mercury vapour and the excited phosphorescent coating that lines the tube. It doesn’t mention anything about the bulbs being “natural sunshine” type, which is odd as I believe it’s exposure to sunlight that is thought to be the critical issue in avoiding SAD. But, maybe that’s not the case it just has to be “bright” any light.

I asked Lumie’s Lindsay Stanley to expand: “The parts fitted within our lights are sourced to ensure they meet strict safety standards and regulations – simply purchasing CFLs ‘off the shelf’ would not ensure this, nor would this produce the required light level.” She also points out that, “All our lights filter out the UV to bring UV levels emitted from the CFLs well within the safe UV thresholds, using CFL’s alone would not do this. We also fit high frequency electronic ballast within the lights so that they do not cause uncomfortable flickering for the consumer. Because all of our products are independently measured and tested and are certified as a medical device, our consumers can rest assured that they are purchasing a product that will do what it claims to do.”

A recent paper does suggest that 40 minutes exposure to light therapy at 10,000 lux improves mood over a period of several weeks of daily use. There was a difference from those on 20 minutes daily and virtually no difference for anyone on 60 minutes daily, although they say a single session improves mood to some degree. But, the team also claimed to have seen a change in mood after the first test with their volunteers, which seems at odds with the need for several weeks testing before any changes would be experienced. The researcher claim:

“Light therapy is an effective treatment of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), when administered daily for at least several weeks. We have previously reported a small improvement in mood in SAD patients following exposure to the first hour of treatment. We now reevaluate retrospectively mood changes during shorter exposures comparing depression ratings at baseline, 20, 40, and 60 minutes of light…The treatment consisted of 10,000 lux of white cool fluorescent light. Depression was measured using the 24-item NIMH scale (24-NIMH)…We conclude that immediate improvement in mood can be detected after the first session of light with exposures as short as 20 minutes, and that 40 minutes of exposure is not less effective than 60 minutes,” the team reports.

Stanley adds that, “Usage times are cumulative, it doesn’t have to be all in one go, and will vary to some extent from person to person and the timing. New research is being carried out all the time, but the key research is that 10,000lux (i.e. visible light received by the user) over 30 minutes treats SAD. Lower lux levels will do the same thing, but over a longer period of time. Furthermore, the melanopsin receptor is more sensitive to bluer wavelengths but as these are less visible they produce lower lux levels. In setting usage times we also rely on photons generated.”

Other researchers recently (July 2011) suggested that bright light therapy (BLT) might also have benefits in chronic depression, post-natal depression, premenstrual depression, bipolar depression and disturbances of the sleep-wake cycle. Although more work needs to be done on those conditions and the effects of BLT. You will probably know that it is typical of the claims of alt med that almost any remedy can treat almost any disorder or condition, which suggests strongly that they’re mostly placebo.

Regarding my skepticism as to whether there is anything special about these therapy lights. A paper published in September 2011 would suggest that there is no additional benefit or effect of using blue-enriched (sunshine) type fluorescent bulbs rather than conventional bulbs. So, assuming this form of therapy for SAD actually works and that SAD actually exists in the first place and isn’t just yet another invented medical condition for the weary well and the healthy sick hypochondriacs among us, can we assume that a lamp labelled “medical device” is going to be beneficial?

A study from 2005 says that “Many reports of the efficacy of light therapy are not based on rigorous study designs.” and that “Adopting standard approaches to light therapy’s specific issues (e.g., defining parameters of active versus placebo conditions) and incorporating rigorous designs (e.g., adequate group sizes, randomized assignment) are necessary to evaluate light therapy for mood disorders.” In other words, how do you exclude the placebo effect and how do you control for things like a “patient” taking a walk on a sunny day?

Stanley does concede that, “We would always say that the best thing for anyone suffering from SAD is to get light from being outside, or seek a winter holiday somewhere bright and sunny. But in the modern world it’s not always practical for people to do this at the right times,” she told me. Hence the market for a BLT.

Research Blogging IconPail G, Huf W, Pjrek E, Winkler D, Willeit M, Praschak-Rieder N, & Kasper S (2011). Bright-light therapy in the treatment of mood disorders. Neuropsychobiology, 64 (3), 152-62 PMID: 21811085

Yoga for zombies

When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, where will you be? And, more importantly, in what position? Will mudra matter? And, how will the practice of pranayama affect your death rattle?

Come the day of the evil dead, it will be not so much “Ommmmmmmmm” as “Uuurrgggghhh”.

Be afraid, be very afraid, or maybe just do a few sun salutations and then medidate on it in Shavasana…

Music makes us human, but what is music?

In his latest book, Harnessed, cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, reveals how and why language, speech and music exist, and why they are apparently uniquely human attributes that separate us, as a species, from the rest of life on Earth.

According to Changizi, the ‘lower’ parts of the brain, the bits that recognise the sounds of nature, the scuffs, cracks and bangs, were hijacked by the ‘upper’ parts of our brain and give us speech as we evolved from our ape-like hominid ancestors. Music emerged from our need to understand the sounds of other people moving around and how our brains are tuned to the beats of footsteps, the Doppler effect and the concept of banging ganglies…and why joggers wearing headphones are “blind” to the people around them…

Read on in my latest Pivot Points column in The Euroscientist, out today.

Solar soda bottle

Here in the UK, people are apparently stockpiling 60-Watt incandescent lightbulbs because rules on importing these energ-wasting products will fall under new import regulations and we may have to start using the much more energy-efficient compact fluorescent tubes or, perish the thought, LED lighting. People are complaining about it all over the place and buying up large numbers of incandescent bulbs (19th century technology, by the way) to keep the dark at bay. It’s what realists call “First World Problem”. Whereas in the parts of the world where poverty, starvation and disease are much more of a concern they are finding ways to bring light to the dark corners, places that have no access to electricity, where the inhabitants spend much of their daily lives in gloom.

Check out the “Liter of Light” project – www.islanglitrongliwanag.org. These bottles are approximately the equivalent of the illumination one gets from a 60W bulb and are made from recycled and quite readily available materials. The project is hoping to light a million homes in the Phillipines by 2012. The light source, of course, only works during the day, but as you will see from the video, the homes of so many people are almost completely dark even at noon…

Underwear stew if Einstein wrong?

Underwear stew if Einstein wrong? – Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey has offered to "eat his shorts" live on TV if it is proven correct that those mountain-burrowing neutrinos really can exceed the speed of light. I strongly suspect that underpants stew will not be on the menu any time soon. It's a "tachy" idea anyway (geddit?).