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Scientists Gain First Glimpse of New Concepts Developing in the Brain

posted by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:36PM   
from the banana-circuit dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon University advances in brain imaging technology, we now know how specific concrete objects are coded in the brain, to the point where we can identify which object, such as a house or a banana, someone is thinking about from its brain activation signature.

Now, CMU scientists are applying this knowledge about the neural representations of familiar concepts by teaching people new concepts and watching the new neural representations develop. Published in Human Brain Mapping, the scientists have -- for the first time -- documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain and show that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

This novel research merges brain science and instructional innovation, two of Carnegie Mellon's university-wide initiatives -- BrainHub, which focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and the Simon Initiative, which aims to measurably improve student learning outcomes by harnessing decades of learning science research.

Another scary and exciting field in the offing. We'll both be able to scan new languages and skills into our heads and make sure our brainwashing techniques have taken effect.

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Original Submission

• MVPA (Score: 3, Informative) by SubiculumHammer on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:47PM

  by SubiculumHammer (5191) on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:47PM (#195121)

  These researchers are using a method called multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Traditional imaging analyses were univariate, essentially contrasting average voxel intensity in brain regions between different experimental conditions. MVPA is a multivariate approach where all the voxel data is used to train classifiers (e.g. support vector machines) to identify patterns of brain "activations" that reliably predict a condition or type of stimulus. MVPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging#Statistical_analysis [wikipedia.org]

  MVPA's ability to read minds is overblown, but it does tend to be more powerful (statistically speaking) than GLM univariate methods since you use all the data.

  I'm not sure if Carnegie Melon developed this technique or is just using it like the rest of us (I'm looking at memory retrieval of the past).

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