“Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons….In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As tempting as it may be to believe the science fiction version of the intelligence rankings, real-life science has spoken and suggests (much to my displeasure) that humans may actually be the highest on the intelligence scale.

Glia are non-neuronal cells found in the brain mainly described as performing “housekeeping” functions, for example, providing structural support to neurons, and providing them with nutrients. Astrocytes are a specific type of glia, and as one might hypothesize, they are bigger in humans than in mice. Was this just a consequence of humans having more complex brains, or do these astrocytes have different functions in humans beyond the basic housekeeping functions? To test this, scientists grafted human astrocyte progenitor cells into developing mouse brains to create chimeric mice.

Human astrocyte (green) and mouse astrocyte (red)

The human astrocytes that matured successfully matured as human cells; characteristics such as their size were unaffected by being in a mouse environment. But they did not remain completely foreign – they successfully formed electrical connections with the mouse cells. Their differing cellular properties were thus propagated into the mouse neural networks. Of particular interest is the hippocampus, the brain region important for learning and memory. Chimeric hippocampal slices had a higher level of baseline excitatory activity, and long-term potentiation (LTP), or synapse strengthening, was much greater. At the molecular level, this can be explained because the human cells express higher levels of a protein that promotes an increased number of glutamate receptors at the synapse.

There were also clear differences in the behavior of chimeric mice. Experiments were performed to test learning and memory abilities to corroborate the cellular results observed in the hippocampus. A classic fear conditioning experiment involves pairing a tone with a foot shock; mice learn to associate the two and exhibit freezing behavior after hearing a tone. Chimeras learned the association after only one tone/shock pairing. The learning persisted for several days, during which time control animals did not learn the initial association. The experiment was repeated as context fear conditioning, meaning that the mice were placed in different chambers that had varying floors and odors. Chimeric mice were able to differentiate between chambers significantly better than their control counterparts. In other learning and memory tasks, these mice learned their way through mazes faster and were better at familiar object recognition in novel contexts.

The results of this study show that glial cells have much more function beyond their basic housekeeping properties. A single cell graft manipulation was enough to significantly improve mouse performance on learning and memory tasks. Complexity of these cells has evolved with the brain, and this provides important new insight on how exactly this complexity has come to be. Future experiments could involve grafting chimpanzee or macaque glia, any differences observed could be key in outlining how our processing abilities evolved from our monkey fathers (I additionally support research with dolphin glia grafts, keeping on the theme of the three most intelligent species). Unfortunately, without the higher processing abilities made possible by human cells, mice likely cannot achieve the tasks and level of status they exhibit in the science fiction. It seems as though man has indeed correctly interpreted his relationship with the mouse.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

-Reena Clements

References:

Human Brain Cells Boost Mouse Memory – ScienceNOW

Forebrain Engraftment by Human Glial Progenitor Cells Enhances Synaptic Plasticity and Learning in Adult Mice – Cell Stem Cell

Zombies are terrifying creatures. The most panic-inducing aspect of their completely factual existence among us is that they have a taste for human blood and they will do anything  to get to it. Recently, the Zombie Research Society (ZRS) has been attempting to scan (with some difficulty due to the fact that zombies aren’t huge fans of staying still in MRIs) and create a map of the zombie brain. A leading researcher in ZRS, Dr. Bradley Voytek, lectured about these terrors at Nerd Night SF. In his presentation he gives a medical term to describe the zombie condition: “consciousness deficit hypoactivity disorder (CDHD)- the loss of rational voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, and the inability to coordinate motor or linguistic behaviors.” So with those messy scans and some preliminary facts we know about the living dead, researchers such as Dr. Voytek have been able to come up with multiple images of what a real zombie brain must look like.

These facts are taken from real-life documentaries of zombie pandemics, such as Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and 28 Days Later. So let’s review the characteristics of zombies the ZRS has established by examining these accounts.

1. According to Major West in 28 Days Later, zombies “are futureless” and therefore no complicated cognitive behaviors would occur. That means no emotion, no love, and therefore no frontal lobe, which is probably why zombies are willing and able to devour humans without remorse.
2. Memory deficiencies occur in zombies, signifying a loss of the hippocampus. We often see short-term and even long-term loss (explaining why they will attack family and old friends). Yet researchers hypothesize there may be some long-term memory intact by examining the story of Shaun of the Dead, primarily the final scene where we see Shaun and his newly turned zombie pal playing video games like old times.
3. Illustrated by their stiff gait, zombies clearly have motor deficits (cerebellar ataxia). This means that the cerebellum has atrophied and they have significantly less area to their cerebellum than the normal human.
4. Zombies also exhibit extreme aggression and a lack of impulse control. These two symptoms can be explained by a lesion to the orbital frontal cortex, which regulates the amygdala, which then connects to the periaqueductal gray, the hypothalamus, and the thalamus. These parts of the brain control rage, fear, agression etc. A lesion on the orbital frontal cortex will cease all regulation of the amygdala and therefore we will observe a drastic increase in aggression and impulse control.
5. And finally we see a language deficit. Very rarely are zombies able to mutter more than a moan of “BRAINNNNSSSS!!!” (which is still relatively complex for their neuroanatomy). Due to this behavior we are able to discern that zombies lack Wernicke’s area (to comprehend speech) and Broca’s area (to relay thoughts through speech).

I’m guessing that you’re thinking Alright this is all fine and dandy, but when I’m attacked by a zombie how do I escape alive? Well you’re probably going to want to run faster and climb higher than the person next to you. Considering their memory deficit, you can hide for long enough and they’ll just forget about you and move on to the next prospective dinner. And remember: trying to talk or reason with a zombie is completely useless.

In almost every major futuristic science-fiction work of the last century, jetpacks and flying cars are seemingly as ubiquitous as today’s oversized SUV’s, lining the closets and garages of every hardworking American.  Understandably, in the year 2011, this has lead many disenchanted Trekkies and purveyors of assorted geek cultures to ask, “Well, scientists, where’s my jetpack?!”  While I commiserate with my fellow fans of Asimov and Adams, several recent innovations have led me to believe that we all might be overlooking just how “futuristic” the time we live in really is.  Accessing Google on the iPhone is certainly as close to the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy as we may ever come.  We have the ability to beam blueprints of intricate plastic objects and now even organs anywhere in the world and literally print them out.  We have computers that can beat us in Jeopardy!  And last but not least, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Brain Driver, the thought-controlled car.  On behalf of scientists everywhere, I accept your apologies, geeks.

The AutoNOMOs Project's semi-autonomous car can be powered by smart phones, tablet computers, and now even your own thoughts.

Brain Driver, a semi-autonomous thought-controlled vehicle, is a research endeavor by the AutoNOMOS project, a division of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Freie Universität Berlin headed by Raul Rojas.  The car itself is fully decked out with 360 degree scanning lasers and cameras.  This allows it to navigate roads, to stay within lines, to avoid pedestrians and other obstructions, and to look super futuristic.  I know, how mundane right?  We’ve all seen that Lexus parallel park itself on TV; this doesn’t impress me.  Except that the team at the AutoNOMOS project isn’t content with stopping here. They have utilized a new consumer EEG technology from Emotiv, called the Epoc, to map distinct thought patterns recorded from the brain onto navigation directions that can be used to control the car.  The Epoc, not the first consumer EEG (Electroencephalography) system of its kind but definitely the most user friendly, uses 16-channels to record electrical patterns in the user’s brain from outside the skull as the user is asked to move a virtual cube on a computer screen to the right, left, forward or backward.  Custom algorithms are then used to map these “thought” patterns, unique to each individual, onto specific navigation commands for the car (forward and backward corresponding to acceleration and deceleration respectively).  As the car approaches an intersection, the system records the thought pattern of the driver and proceeds to turn in the desired direction.

Well, that’s the plan anyway.  While the system does work with good regularity, there is a distinct drawback to the two-second delay between when the electrical patterns are read and when the car actually turns.  It also has the limitation of only being able to discern between four different commands, not exactly enough for normal road navigation.  It also appears that a large swath of the population seems to be what Rojas refers to in an article on Wired.com as “BCI illiterate”, or incapable of using EEG based brain-computer interface technologies.

The Emotiv Epoc EEG headset allows mind reading to become a portable activity.

If vaguely unreliable, thought-controlled cars seem like a bad idea to you, I can certainly see where you are coming from.  It’s undeniable that this isn’t intended to be the ultimate use of this technology.  There are, thankfully, researches looking to apply these very same ideas to more useful and practical means, like motorized wheelchairs.  When applied in this way, this gadget moves beyond the realm of mere novelty item intended to intrigue the masses, into a life changing technology for people who could truly use it.  A thought-controlled wheelchair would allow quadriplegics, and others whose conditions leave them with minimal control of their bodies, to move about their worlds simply with their thoughts.  As far back as 2007, Javier Minguez of the University of Zaragosa gave an interview to Wired.com discussing his group’s work on thought-controlled wheelchairs.  At that time, portable consumer EEG technologies were not available; subjects were literally tethered to oversized desktop computers.  One could see how this might be a problem.  With the advent of the Emotiv Epoc, and the vehicle control technologies developed by the AutoNOMOS project, the hurdles between the current state of this technology and widespread consumer availability now lay exclusively in training people to use the technology, and increasing the number, and complexity of the directions the system can learn.  Australian researchers D.A. Craig and H.T. Nguyen at the University of Technology in Sydney are already hard at work on this problem.  In a clever attempt to map a greater number of more complex commands, these researchers have combined thought pattern mapping for diverse and complex mental exercises with head motion sensors, adding many degrees of freedom to the command interface.  We can only assume that with research on both the EEG and autonomous vehicle fronts moving forward, it won’t be terribly long before thought-controlled wheelchairs are commonplace amongst the American public.  Jetpacks or no jetpacks, the future is here, and I for one am ecstatic about the technological possibilities it promises!

The AutoNOMOs Project

Emotiv- Brain Computer Interface Technology

Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – Videos on TED.com

A wheelchair that reads your mind-Wired.com

Thinking your way through traffic in a brain-controlled car-Autopia-Wired.com

Craig DA, Nguyen HT. “Adaptive EEG Thought Pattern Classifier for Advanced Wheelchair Control.” 2007 Annal International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Vols 1-16 : 2544-2547 2007-PubMed

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a particular aspect of Isaac Asimov’s writing, of which I can’t help being reminded after reading these reports.  As the father of the term “robotics” and all things relating to it, Asimov dealt with nearly all of the issues relating to artificial intelligence.  A few of his fictional robot characters even developed human-like, self-aware consciousness and creativity.  But the one thing which stands out about these characters was that their consciousness was rarely a design of their creators, but rather a fluke.  Minute variations in the mechanized construction of their positronic brains amounted to  unique, creative minds.

Asimov’s choice to author conscious robots as results of random chance forces us to think about how human consciousness evolved in reality.  It may be that such a consciousness is not strictly required for an organism to dramatically enhance its chances of survival and reproduction. We seem to assume that our superior cognitive abilities grant us an enormous advantage over other species, that the sort of consciousness which makes us self-aware, reflective and creative was the “end result” in a very long line of brain development.  But evolution does not work towards such a specific end.  There are plenty of other species (e.g. viruses) that persist with just as much vigor as us, despite their lack of cognitive powers associated with the forebrain.  Perhaps only a minor, random mutation resulted in a dramatic and permanent change in the brain, a change which ultimately amounted to consciousness.  Who knows what the odds are that such an intelligence evolved, or will evolve again in a computer simulation?  At least we can be reassured that, on a long enough time scale, even the most unlikely event can occur.

In any case, Boston University’s own Isaac Asimov has made many a prediction with his science fiction, and many more can be expected.

“Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence”-Catherine Brahic