Anhinga anhinga

The perception of conscious will is an inference. Daniel Wegner demonstrated a while ago, that it is easy to create experimental setups, where the subject has illusion of freely causing events, which are completely independent of his actions or intentions.

cognitivedaily is reporting on an experiment, which sheds some extra light on the inference of conscious will:

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/free_choice_may_not_be_as_free.php

Here, the subject presses the button, and the beep sounds as a result, but a random delay is added between pressing the button and the resulting beep sound. Then the subject is asked to pinpoint the moment of time, when the decision to press the button was made. It turns out that subjects on average estimate that moment as approximately 130 milliseconds before the beep sound (and that the estimate depends very weekly on the actual time when the subject pressed the button). ( a bit of discussion )

Recently, I reread a number of papers in neuro. The one I liked the most is "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness" by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in Seminars in the Neurosciences (1990), Volume 2, pages 263–275:

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/F/D/_/scbcfd.pdf

( a bit about this paper )

I hope the next year will be better than the outgoing one...

Good luck in the New Year!

Our thinking about fMRI data is too straightforward.

( We see this signal in primary visual cortex (V1) of monkeys engaged in periodic fixation tasks, even in total darkness, with little or no measurable underlying neuronal activity. )

If you have registered, this is a reminder, that the conference is on May 9, this Wednesday:

http://h20.media.mit.edu/speakers.html

http://anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com/49745.html

I thought the organizers would send e-mail reminders, but it looks like they decided not to bother..

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ICCNS 11 (Cognitive and Neuro) is next week, but the program looks less interesting than in the previous years:

http://cns-web.bu.edu/cns-meeting/schedule.html

Numenta is founded by Jeff Hawkins, the author of "On Intelligence" (memory-prediction framework).

A research release of their "Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing" is now available for Linux and Mac OS (free, targeted at sophisticated developers for the purpose of education and experimentation, no deployment rights).

To finish reviewing the 10th ICCNS conference, here is an image related to the plenary talk "Toward cognitive prostheses" by Ken Ford of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (Florida):

A traditional aircraft cockpit setup vs. OZ cockpit display:



Image from http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030830/bob9.asp

The rest of the 10th ICCNS review is in my journal for drafts, including more details related to OZ cockpit, tongue-based interfaces, funding under NSF Science of Learning program, stress/norepinephrine-induced retrograde memory enhancement, norepinephrine control of exploitation/exploration tradeoffs in the behavior, and more:

http://anhinga-drafts.livejournal.com/4860.html

More 10th ICCNS findings: Razvan Florian (Romania) presented a poster, "Reinforcement learning for spiking neural networks with modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity". Basically, this modifies the reinforcement learning approach by Jonathan Baxter and Peter Bartlett for the situation with spikes. (One nice thing is that training for XOR works successfully in this case. I had difficulties with making the classical Baxter-Bartlett setup to work for XOR, either because of some principal problems, or because my hands grow from the wrong places.) His papers are here:

http://www.coneural.org/florian/

Meanwhile, Bostonians can see jaguar cubs at Stone Zoo in Stoneham. Here are some photos:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/gallery/052506_stonehamzoo_jaguars/

Tenth International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems.

May 17 – 20, 2006, Boston University

( related links )

Eugene Izhikevich is trying to create Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia, using the same MediaWiki software which powers Wikipedia. Its first project is an attempt to create Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience.

With his energy, and given the commitments of a number of well-known authors to be responsible for the articles, the chances of success seem reasonably high. Meanwhile, a preliminary version of his book, "Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience: The Geometry of Excitability and Bursting", to be published by the MIT Press this summer, can be downloaded from here (14MB):

http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/publications/index.htm

"Sigmund Freud and the Crick-Koch hypothesis. A footnote to the history of consciousness studies"

( a curiosity item )