discuss here.

In 1962 The origin of Brain Mapping Research was first started in Ohio, and conducted at the Columbus State Hospital. More than 500 subjects were scanned using the US patented Hyper-frequency Electroencephalograph (Hyfreeg) brain scanner for the Brain Mapping Research. [2] A detailed brain mapping report was published by the Battelle Memorial Institute "A New Window into the Human Brain?". [3] The Journal of the American Medical Association also published a report concerning this brain mapping research: "Is Nervous System Amplitude or Frequency Oriented?". [4] JAMA reported: "One of the points on which most neurologist have agreed, is that the nervous system is amplitude oriented. Now a new theory indicates exactly the opposite--that the nervous system actually is frequency oriented." As a result of the brain mapping research, the Psychiatric team members were able to cure: Epilepsy, Psychomotor Epilepsy, Hallucinations, and Schizophrenia by lowering the neuronal activity in the Reticular Activating System located in the Brain Stem. They also observed the functions of Dreaming and the unique functions of the two Brain Hemispheres that was later confirmed by a girl born with only one Hemisphere. [5] [6]

A book has been published by Kindle Books describing the original Brain Mapping Research project conducted by Battelle Memorial Institute, and identifies a behavioral classification matrix and methods for personality modification. [7]

Victor H. Fischer was the Principle Investigator of the original Psychiatric team incorporating: ten Clinical Psychiatrists, Dr. Paul W. Watkins MD as a member of the Psychiatric staff, Dr. Calvin Baker MD, former commissioner of the Ohio Department of Mental Hygiene, and Neurologist consultant, USAF Colonel Robert F. Hood, MD, Neurology and Psychiatry, Director of Psychiatry, Wright-Patterson Medical Center, USA.

In the late 1980s in the United States, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science was commissioned to establish a panel to investigate the value of integrating neuroscientific information across a variety of techniques.[8]

Of specific interest is using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion MRI (dMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET), Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and other non-invasive scanning techniques to map anatomy, physiology, perfusion, function and phenotypes of the human brain. Both healthy and diseased brains may be mapped to study memory, learning, aging, and drug effects in various populations such as people with schizophrenia, autism, and clinical depression. This led to the establishment of the Human Brain Project.[9] It may also be crucial to understanding traumatic brain injuries (as in the case of Phineas Gage)[10] and improving brain injury treatment.[11]

Following a series of meetings, the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) evolved.[12] The ultimate goal is to develop flexible computational brain atlases.

On May 5, 2010 the Supreme Court in India (Smt. Selvi vs. State of Karnataka) declared brain mapping, lie detector tests and narcoanalysis to be unconstitutional, violating Article 20 (3) of Fundamental Rights. These techniques cannot be conducted forcefully on any individual and requires consent for the same. When they are conducted with consent, the material so obtained is regarded as evidence during trial of cases according to Section 27 of the Evidence Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_mapping

Google “brain” right now and you’ll find a mountain of news stories on a development known as the BigBrain project, which came out just yesterday: Researchers in Europe and Canada have just mapped the human brain with a precision that’s so strikingly detailed, that it’s unprecedented in humans – and it’s in 3D. The team has devised a way to cut the brain into 20 micrometer-thick sections – far slimmer than the chunky 1 mm sections that have been available with magnetic resonance – dye them, scan them, and reconstruct the slices into a 3D “atlas” of the human brain. But while the research is impressive by any count, and it will certainly gives us some clues into brain cell function and anatomy, there’s a limit to what it can tell us.

To accomplish the mission, the team used the donated brain of a 65-year old woman. It was preserved in formalin and then set in paraffin before slicing. The sections were mounted on glass slides and stained. Then came the scanning prep.

“After this we had over 7400 histological sections,” says author Katrin Amunts. “And a large number of wooden boxes in the lab to hold them!” She and her team used a flatbed scanner to scan the slices – a process, says Amunts, that took about 1,000 hours alone. Part of the process was the removal of all the artifacts of slicing – folds, ruptures, and other miscellaneous blips.

The 3D image of the brain was formed by reconstructing the slices, making what is essentially a cell-by-cell computer image or “atlas” of the brain. The data take up a mind-boggling terabyte of space.

So what information does brain mapping actually offer? It will certainly give us a better idea of where one region ends and the next begins, for a closer understanding of behavior-brain correspondence. It will also allow researchers to start making simulations, perhaps making it possible to “see” what happens in various disease states, say, in an Alzheimer’s- or Parkinson’s afflicted brain over time. “Researchers can take these images,” says Amunts, “and measure surfaces, thicknesses of cortical layers. It provides precise anatomical measures, and lets us make comparisons to in vivo imaging.”


She adds that this brain essentially becomes a new gold standard in the field. “We have a new reference brain,” says Amunts. “It can help us address questions and data coming from neuroscience about things like receptor distribution, microanatomy. Before this, the data were so scattered, we haven’t been able to compare it very effectively.” Plus, the resolution from MRI scans is much poorer – a clumsy 1-mm thickness, which is “not good enough to address questions about microstructure,” adds Amunts.

In terms of the person-to-person brain differences that are inevitable, Amunts says, “This is true. And we’ve actually started second brain, to account for some of these. We’re aware of intersubject variability. But the first brain has all the areas that you need.” She says her team probably won’t do more than a few brains in total, given the massive time commitment each requires.

And BigBrain will almost certainly have some major clinical implications, giving doctors a hand in neurosurgery and in placing electrodes during procedures like deep brain stimulation (DBS).

What the project doesn’t do is tell us a whole lot about anything else – those “deeper” questions that we’re all dying understand. In this way, the headlines touting BigBrain’s ability to work such magic as to “unlock the secrets of the mind” and that kind of thing may not to so accurate.

In fact, in a well-timed New York Times editorial this week, David Brooks makes the important point that the brain is not, after all, the mind, and as much as we’d like to think we’re getting closer to grasping human consciousness and thought with imaging studies, we’re just not. The “neurocentrism,” he says, that we’re so attached to is actually not serving us so well at all. In his words, “An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data. The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.”

When asked about the limits of the 3D brain atlas, Amunts says that though it doesn’t answer all questions, ultimately, basic neuroscience is critical for what it can offer us. “I’m a physician by training. I want to know why the region in the language area is involved in language. You have to understand brain first.” Her past work has mapped out the architecture of the brain, and, she says, the specificity can be dazzling. “And now we can look at everything in the same brain. If you only do small bit, you don’t have the full truth. But now we can analyze the whole brain.”

So this is on many levels a big accomplishment for Europe’s Human Brain Project, which has the not unlike our own BRAIN initiative. But there are limits to what it can tell us, and it only gives a peek at what’s actually going on in our heads. There’s much more work to be done, and a staggering number of questions that still need answers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/06/21/what-does-human-brain-mapping-actually-tell-us/#2715e4857a0b67ca56a6467d

Scientists develop software that can map dreams


The secret world of dreams has been unlocked with the invention of technology capable of illustrating images taken directly from human brains during sleep.



A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen.

While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people's dreams and other brain processes.
A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: "It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity.

"By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams." The scientists, lead by chief researcher Yukiyaso Kamitani, focused on the image recognition procedures in the retina of the human eye.

It is while looking at an object that the eye's retina is able to recognise an image, which is subsequently converted into electrical signals sent into the brain's visual cortex.
The research investigated how electrical signals are captured and reconstructed into images, according to the study, which will be published in the US journal Neuron.

As part of the experiment, researchers showed testers the six letters of the word "neuron", before using the technology to measure their brain activity and subsequently reconstruct the letters on a computer screen.
Since Sigmund Freud published The Interpretations of Dreams over a century ago, the workings of the sleeping human mind have been the source of extensive analysis by scientists keen to unlock its mysteries.
Dreams were the focus of a scientific survey conducted by the Telegraph last year in which it was concluded that dreams were more likely to be shaped by events of the past week than childhood traumas.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/3705790/Scientists-develop-software-that-can-map-dreams.html

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind

magine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.



However, researchers point out that the technology is decades from allowing users to read others’ thoughts and intentions, as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as “Brainstorm,” in which scientists recorded a person’s sensations so that others could experience them.

Previously, Gallant and fellow researchers recorded brain activity in the visual cortex while a subject viewed black-and-white photographs. They then built a computational model that enabled them to predict with overwhelming accuracy which picture the subject was looking at.

In their latest experiment, researchers say they have solved a much more difficult problem by actually decoding brain signals generated by moving pictures.

“Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie,” said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant’s lab. “In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.”



Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.”

“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said.

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.

Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images.


“We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals,” Nishimoto said.

Ultimately, Nishimoto said, scientists need to understand how the brain processes dynamic visual events that we experience in everyday life.

“We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said. “For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.”


http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

Brain–computer interface


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface

Neurofeedback


Neurofeedback is the direct training of the brain, where one is able to monitor their own brain activity on a computer screen and then learn how to produce brainwave activity that promotes healthy brain function.



http://newmentalityinc.com/treatments/qeeg-brain-mapping/

Remote Neural Monitoring


maps out electrical activity from the visual cortex of somebody's brain and shows images from the person's brain on a video monitor. The observers see what the victim is seeing, even if they are in a different location.

Remote monitoring of brain signatures

.