Researchers claim that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent (from nytimes.com).

Until now, it had been widely assumed that the so-called “fluid intelligence, the ability to reason, solve new problems and think in the abstract is largeley genetic - or innate.

Now experiments show that people can increase the brainpower they had at birth. And, the harder they train, the more points are added to the person’s IQ.

But why does it work? How long will the effects last? And how can a person profit from such a training?

Learning and forgetting are the two sides of the same medal. There is an ideal moment to practice what we have learned. Practice too soon and we waste our time. Practice too late and we’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment we’re about to forget.

However, revising at precisely the optimal moment is quite impossible in the real world. How can we pinpoint the exact moment when to rehearse? SuperMemo, a programme, is the answer.

Imagine SuperMemo turning us users all into geniuses. Just insert the plug (use SuperMemo) and we know a new language - almost like Neo in the Science Fiction movie Matrix… (from wired.com).  

ScienceBlogs.de has interviewed neuroscientist Eric Kandel who won the Nobel price for his work on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of underlying learning and memory.

In the 21 min video Eric Kandel speaks about memory, free will and his views on Freud. The interview is in English.

We all feel that we make decisions consciously and then carry out the actions. However, modern neuroscience has discovered that decisions are predetermined unconsciously before we become conscious that we intend to act (from newscientist.com). This findings suggest that our brain unconsciously makes decisions for us. So is there a free will?

Is there no free will, just because we are not yet conscious of a decision? But our brains are still free to make the decision, albeit without us being aware of it. Maybe the definition of the free will is the crux.. 

The other question is, can we stop a decision, that is unconsciously being prepared?

A group of researchers attempts to teach iCub, a humanoid baby robot, language. The approach is to work with language development specialists who research how parents teach children to speak. The iCub is supposed to learn in a way which is closer to the human experience (from telegraph.co.uk).

However, children learn a language on their own without help of an adult. It seems humans learn a language by discerning vowels and consonants for different types of information, which helps a novice to understand what a word is and later on to understand its meaning (from Cognitive Daily).

Just by discerning vowels and consonants a human can eventually learn a new language. So, is the ability to speak and understand a language innate? And does this mean, a robot without this in-built language skill can not learn how to speak?

The Blue Brain project aims to create a biological accurate simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer and thus by reverse-engineering to understand how it functions.

So far, the project is simulating a neocortical column of a rat, that is about about 10,000 neurons and a total of about 30 million synaptic connections. 

However, the human brain has 100 billion neurons. Henry Markram, Head of the Blue Brain project, estimates that an entire brain would require the processing of 500 petabytes of data… What will happen, once it is feasible to scale up the project? Is it possible to put a ghost into a machine?  Is consciousness just a massive amount of information being exchanged by billions of brain cells (from Seed)?

How does the brain work? How does memory work? How do we learn? These are questions that puzzle us all. But Joe Tsien wants more: He wants to understand how the brain operates - decode the brain by studying the molecular and neural mechanisms of memory formation.

The brain uses a set of rules for translating electric activity into perception, memories, knowledge and behaviour. When we understanding this code, we will be able to read all the information in the brain. And when we understand how the brain processes information, we will be able to construct computers on the same principles (from mcg.edu).

Robots are a challenge, because they represent our double. They have to have all kinds of different attributes like vision, planning, natural language, learning…

The developers of COSPAL claim its robotic AI is the most advanced of its type, because it combines learning neural AI techniques and traditional rule-based AI. The robot can be trained like a puppy. It can perform tasks based on its own experiences and observation of humans (from physorg).