This (click) was kinda interesting.  Kinda.

It seems Professor Henry Markram is determined to build a replica of the human brain by first dissecting one and then ‘reanimating’ it through an elaborate software program.  He plans to have this all done by 2018 (more of less) which, he predicts, should be the time when computing technology has advanced enough to allow it.  Essentially I guess, his goal is to recreate the brain’s pathway/circuitry into a computing environment which could hopefully reproduce something along the lines of consciousness?  I guess.  The Swiss government and IBM are in his corner …so both money and clout are in the picture.

The good I see from this comes in potential theoretical advancements as well as progress in computing technology.  The bad though, seems to be showing itself already… “But he also admits that his machines could be used for evil purposes – by the military, for instance, to create futuristic killing machines.  For this reason, in an extremely unusual move for a publicly funded scientist, he has decided to keep some of the computer coding for the Blue Brain project secret.“

Riveting science fiction?  Let’s just hope the good and not the evil military get the killing machines!

Image from a classic ...click to watch.

]]> http://eldecog.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/temporal-processing-in-primate-motor-control-relation-between-cortical-and-emg-activity-by-olivier-f-l-manette-and-marc-a-maier/ Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:51:54 +0000 eldecog http://eldecog.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/temporal-processing-in-primate-motor-control-relation-between-cortical-and-emg-activity-by-olivier-f-l-manette-and-marc-a-maier/

Abstract—We investigated spatio-temporal information processing in the primate motor system. Corticomotoneuronal (CM) cells provide monosynaptic excitatory connections from motor cortex to spinal motoneurons and contribute causally to the time-varying electromyogram (EMG) of their target muscle. A multilayer perceptron (MLP) was used to evaluate the transfer function between neural activity of single CM cells and their target muscle EMG, using data from in-vivo recordings in primate motor cortex. For an optimal MLP performance, i.e., minimal error between recorded target EMG and MLP-derived EMG, the CM cell input period had to span the latency observed between CM cell peak activity and EMG peak activity. We argue that the same spike train may code two types of information:

1. rate coding within the input window accounted for large-amplitude variations in the EMG signal and
2. temporal coding within a window of 40 ms just prior to the EMG output signal accounted or EMG variations of small amplitude.

The transfer function of the MLP, thus, combines rate and temporal coding and suggests that CM cell output may also combine these two forms of coding.

We predict that mutual constraints of rate and temporal coding would, however, would limit the CM output to code for particular temporal profiles of EMG, possibly adapted to bio-mechanical constraints.

Read the full PDF article here : Temporal Processing in Primate Motor Control