RoboCop and I, Robot may not be as far-fetched as you think, and IBM and five universities including Stanford are teaming up to prove it. But first, they plan to build a computer that mimics the complexity of a cat’s brain.

It’s called ‘cognitive computing,’ a field that combines neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists, and psychologists. In this project the scientists and IBM come together to try and combine what they know about biological systems and supercomputer simulations of neurons.

A “consciously thinking” computer is to be built with the same structure as a human brain, consisting of umpteen million virtual neurons connected to each other via simulated synapses. Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration and who worked on the Blue Brain project (see Supercomputer’s Key to the Brain) says, the problem is that we don’t really have a precise definition of what consciousness actually is. The mind effortlessly creates categories of time, space and interrelationships between them from the information provided by a large number of sensors. 

(via DailyTech)

Scientists in Netherlands have have developed a mind-reading state-of-the-art software, which can scan a brain to decipher the sounds spoken to a person, and even who is saying them.

The researchers found that each speaker and each sound created a distinctive “neural fingerprint” in a listener’s auditory cortex, the brain region that deals with hearing. They then trained the software by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of seven people, while they heard three different speakers saying simple vowel sounds. 

Read about this sort of speech-recognition device, which is completely based on the brain activity of the listener (via NewScientist).

Researchers plan to use living neural networks composed of thousands of brain cells from laboratory rats to control and manage power grids. The researcher hope to develop biologically inspired artificial neural networks, which can control power systems and other complex systems such as traffic control systems or global financial networks.

(via mst.edu)

Remember the movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” Former lovers have their memories of their failed relationship erased…

Well, it does not sound so much like Science Fiction anymore: Neurobiologist Joe Tsien of the Medical College of Georgia (see Decoding the Brain) has found a way to erase specific memories in mice while leaving others intact and not damaging the brain.

(via technologyreview.com)