Exciting work from my Department of Biomedical Engineering colleagues, Danni Wang and Steve Leigh, over in the Molecular Biophotonics lab at Stony Brook University, on the development of advanced microscopy tools for in vivo imaging during brain tumor resection.

Source: stonybrookmedicine.edu

This film is really beautiful, for a number of reasons. Subjects are asked to focus on “love” while being imaged at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. The science certainly wouldn’t pass peer-review, but the cinematography is stunning, and the idea beautiful.

Source: vimeo.com

A friend in neuroscience sent me this talk. Exciting idea of creating Google Maps for the brain — perhaps we’re finally at a point where we can begin to correlate and synthesize the massive data we collect on the human brain and its functions.

How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.

Source: ted.com

10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers

scipsy:

#1 Brains are analogue; computers are digital

#2 The brain uses content-addressable memory

#3 The brain is a massively parallel machine; computers are modular and serial

#4 Processing speed is not fixed in the brain; there is no system clock

#5 Short-term memory is not like RAM

#6 No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect of the brain or mind

#7 Synapses are far more compex than electrical logic gates

#8 Unlike computers, processing and memory are performed by the same components in the brain

#9 The brain is a self-organizing system

#10 Brains have bodies

Bonus difference: the brain is much, much bigger than any [current] computer

A 2007 article. I wonder if computers are so changed that now there are less differences…