A million programmable neurons: IBM closer to human brain-like computer

 Tech2 08 Aug 2014 , 14:02

IBM unveiled a “brain-like” computer chip on Thursday that is the size of a postage stamp and capable of processing massive amounts of data while handling inputs from many different sources, the company said.

The announcement comes one month after IBM unveiled a $3 billion investment over the next five years in chip research and development to find a game-changing breakthrough that can help revive its slumping hardware unit.

Unlike most chips, which operate on pre written paths, IBM’s version processes data in realtime and is capable of dealing with ambiguity, the company said. It runs on the energy equivalent of a hearing aid.

Built on Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co Ltd’s 28nm process technology, the chip only consumes 70mW of energy.

A product of almost a decade of research, the chip aims to bridge the divide between existing computers and the brain’s high cognitive power and low energy use. “After years of collaboration with IBM, we are now a step closer to building a computer similar to our brain,” said Professor Rajit Manohar at Cornell Tech, where the chip was designed.

The chip contains one million programmable neurons and could allow a thermometer to scan and smell chemical signals and deliver a diagnosis, or help a search and rescue robot to identify people in need during a disaster, the company said.

IBM hopes it can integrate multi-sensory processing into mobile devices and says the chip can handle future advances in memory, 3G integration, logic and sensor technologies.

Reuters

Train Your Brain to Stay Positive

Nadiagodman :19 jan 2014 

As an entrepreneur, conquering challenge and failure is essential to the success of your business. You can learn to cultivate that resilience by training your brain to stay positive when times are tough.

"People tend to have a cognitive bias toward their failures, and toward negativity," says Matthew Della Porta, a positive psychologist and organizational consultant. Our brains are more likely to seek out negative information and store it more quickly to memory

Of course, that bias is not always bad. Acknowledging problems and facing failures can lead us to better solutions. But too often, we go overboard, and beat ourselves up for our failures or let ourselves dwell in the negative.

By consciously increasing our focus on the positive, we start to even the balance. We find a happy medium where we can address failures and challenges without letting them get us down, leaving us more motivated, productive, and likely to succeed.

Try these 3 tips to help you train your brain to 

stay positive: 

1. Express gratitude. Negative events loom large unless you consciously balance them out. "When you're faced with challenges, it's important to take stock of what's going well," Della Porta says. Thinking about the good in your life can help balance that bias, giving your brain the extra time it needs to register and remember a positive event. 

To help your brain store positive events, reflect on what you're grateful for and why at least once a week. Write down your blessings, such as the opportunity to pursue a career you love or a family that supports you. If you prefer a daily habit, then keep a nightly log of good things that happened that day. "Just keep it very short," Della Porta says. "If you try to hammer [gratitude] home, then it becomes mundane." Day One, a journaling app for Apple devices ($4.99), orOhLife, a free email-based journal, can to help you do this. 

2. Repeat positive affirmations. As any politician or advertiser knows, the more often you hear a message, the more likely you are to believe it. The same goes for messages about who you are and what you are capable of doing. By repeating positive affirmations with conviction several times each morning, you are training your brain to believe them. "Over time, you'll start to internalize them," Della Porta says. Repeat your affirmations silently if you feel self-conscious.

Choose two to three affirmations that represent your values and goals, such as 'I can handle whatever comes my way,' 'There is plenty of time,' or 'I’m getting better every day.' The repetition will influence the way you interpret negative events, making you more resilient. "Especially if you're predisposed to negative thinking, this can be extremely effective," Della Porta says.

3. Challenge negative thoughts. Each time a negative thought arises, we choose how to respond. If left to our own devices, we tend to dwell. Our brains home in on negative events so they seem much bigger and more significant than they are. To combat that, start by imagining the thought as separate from yourself, as something you can observe and deconstruct. "Get in the habit of distancing yourself instead of dwelling," Della Porta says.

Next, challenge negative thoughts that are unfairly self-deprecating. For example, if your startup doesn't get the traction you hoped, you might think, "I'm a failure." That's untrue and unproductive. Instead, practice interpreting the same event differently. You might say, I worked really hard but I didn't account for a quirk of the market, so I'm disappointed, but now I’m going to try again with new information. That interpretation is gentler, truer, and more proactive. "At first, [this strategy will] be hard and you’ll think it doesn't work," Della Porta says. "But over time, it'll become automatic and negative thoughts will be less likely to come up. No one does this naturally; you have to learn and practice."

Your Brain on Math

Time :By Maia SzalavitzApril 23, 2013

Among the 100 million or so nerve cells in the brain, it turns out there is a group dedicated to making sense of numbers.

No one is born knowing their 1, 2, 3’s or A, B, C’s. However, the brain clearly handles these uniquely human but culturally varied types of knowledge differently. Many people, for example, are far stronger in one area or another, showing a propensity for verbal skills over numerical ones or vice versa.

So understanding how the brain codes these different systems could not only aid children with language disabilities, for instance, or those who struggle with processing numbers, but could also help to reveal more about how the brain works to process new information and acquire knowledge.

In a new study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers tested seven people with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted in their brains to determine the source of their seizures. Researchers have learned a great deal about the brain with the help of such patients, including more about how the brain works to produce speech and the effect of anesthesia on consciousness. The electrodes help inform doctors about the source of electrical disturbances that contribute to the seizures; some of these patients may then be eligible for additional surgery to remove the damaged region. Because of the unusual circumstance of having electrodes in their brain that can track neural activity, these patients are often approached to volunteer for clinical trials of brain function.

In the first experiment aimed at determining the brain’s “numeral area,” participants looked at single digits, letters, foreign numeral symbols from languages they didn’t know and at images of distorted numbers and letters that were unreadable. They were asked to press keys on the computer indicating whether or not they could read each symbol. In a second test, the volunteers saw either numbers, the words depicting numerals (one instead of 1) or words that sounded similar to number words (won instead of one), which they read aloud.

The researchers pinpointed a group of around 1 million to 2 million cells, located in a region called the inferior temporal gyrus that extends into both sides of the head near the ear canals. These cells responded much more strongly when the participants processed actual numbers than number words, meaningless symbols resembling the numbers or the numbers written in an unknown foreign language.

“This is the first ever study to show the existence of a cluster of nerve cells in the human brain that specializes in processing numerals,” Dr. Josef Parvizi, associate professor of neurology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “It’s a dramatic demonstration of our brain circuitry’s capacity to change in response to education. No one is born with the innate ability to recognize numerals.”

Because the second experiment asked the participants to distinguish between phonetically similar words for the numbers (too instead of two) and the numerals, the researchers could determine that different brain regions sent were activated by the idea of the number, not just the sound of the word.

The authors say that the region of the brain that preferentially processes numerals is close to the area that is responsible for interpreting language, which makes sense since people often read words and numbers together. That could explain why previous work showed that some types of brain damage, for example, can interfere with reading letters but leave numeral reading unaffected, or can cause verbal dyslexia but not numerical confusion.

Interestingly, however, the cells responding to numerals seem to be physically close to those that process distorted numbers and to foreign number symbols, suggesting they might share a common origin and could be specialized versions of cells that generally process visual images of lines, angles and curves. Additional research on this region of cells could inform how education and learning tease out this subgroup of these cells to process numerals in particular.

The study may also explain why such regions have not appeared in imaging studies of the brain that did not have the advantage of the implanted electrodes to track physiological activity. Since the inferior temporal gyrus is so close to the ear canals, functional MRI machines, which detect changes in oxygen use and blood flow by nerve cells, may not be as sensitive to the activity of neurons tucked away in that area.

However, say the researchers, combining different techniques should lead to deeper understanding of the brain’s inner workings and start to reveal some of its seemingly inscrutable mysteries.

Maia Szalavitz @maiasz

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com 

and co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered.

How to Refresh Your Brain--in 10 Minutes

Francesca Louise Fenzi | Inc.

When you go from one task to the next--all day long--your mind constantly races to catch up. Hit the reset button with this underrated trick.

Andy Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk and co-founder of Headspace, an entrepreneurial venture designed to demystify meditation and make it easily accessible to all audiences. In a recent TED talk, Puddicombe promotes an idea that almost sounds too easy to be true: refresh your mind in just 10 minutes a day and you might be happier at work.

Puddicombe seeks to provide “meditation for the modern world,” eliminating stereotypes of incense and cross-legged monks. And he might just be on to something. Here are two problems that plague modern-day workers--and how Headspace’s bite-sized meditation plan can help. 

Problem #1: Inability to Focus

“The average office worker changes windows [on her computer] 37 times an hour,” Headspace’s head of research Nick Begley says in a meditation tutorial.

According to Begley, when your mind changes gears that rapidly, part of your brain is still engaged in the previous task and you don’t have all of the attention and resources necessary to concentrate on the current task. This slows down productivity and reduces your ability to filter relevant information from irrelevant information. 

Problem #2: Stress

When people get stressed, there is a part of the brain called the amygdala that fires up the “fight or flight” part of the nervous system that helps you make quick, impulsive decisions.

“It signals to our hormonal system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol and increases our heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure, so we can escape this immediate physical danger,” says Begley.

The problem arises when there is no immediate physical danger--when, say, you’ve forgotten to hit “save” on an important document and your computer crashes, or you arrive unprepared for an important business meeting. The “fight or flight” impulse is not actually helpful in those situations and merely puts undue stress on the body, Begley explains.  

The Solution

Refreshing your brain is easier than you think. Here's the first and only step: Do nothing.

Puddicombe recommends simply setting aside 10 minutes each day to quiet your mind. Practice observing thoughts and anxieties without passing judgment--simply experience them. Focus on the present moment and nothing else.

“We can’t change every little thing that happens to us,” he acknowledges, “but we can change how we experience it.”