From Angry Birds to brain mapping: The Gamification of Neuroscience

___ A Quar­ter Mil­lion Gamers Helped Build This Incred­i­bly Detailed Map of the Brain (Sin­gu­lar­i­ty­Hub): “In 2012, when Angry Birds was in its prime, Seung had an inspi­ra­tion. “What if,” he won­dered, “we could cap­ture even a small frac­tion of the men­tal effort that goes into Angry Birds (for brain map­ping)? Think of what we…

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Understanding the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”

From Macro to Micro: A Visu­al Guide to the Brain (IEEE Spec­trum) In the human brain, high­­er-lev­­el infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing occurs in the neo­cor­tex, neur­al tis­sue that forms the out­er lay­er of the cere­bral cor­tex. In its intri­cate folds, brain cells work togeth­er to inter­pret sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion and to form thoughts and plans. The neo­cor­tex is…

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7 ways in which the Human Connectome Project is moving the brain research needle

———- The Human Con­nec­tome Project: Progress and Prospects (Cere­brum): “Under­stand­ing the human brain in health and dis­ease rep­re­sents a grand sci­en­tif­ic chal­lenge for the 21st cen­tu­ry and beyond. How does a col­lec­tion of 90 bil­lion neu­rons inter­con­nect­ed by 150 tril­lion synaps­es give rise to the extra­or­di­nary capa­bil­i­ties of human behav­ior and the amaz­ing diver­si­ty of talents…

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A new era of brain cartography, powered by neuroimaging and machine learning

Human brain mapped in unprece­dent­ed detail (Nature): “Think of a spin­ning globe and the patch­work of coun­tries it depicts: such maps help us to under­stand where we are, and that nations dif­fer from one anoth­er. Now, neu­ro­sci­en­tists have chart­ed an equiv­a­lent map of the brain’s out­er­most lay­er — the cere­bral cor­tex — sub­di­vid­ing each hemi­sphere’s…

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Scanning healthy brains to understand and enhance our minds

The Brain, in Exquis­ite Detail (The New York Times): “Each of the 1,200 sub­jects whose brain data will form the final data­base will spend a good 10 hours over two days being scanned and doing oth­er tests. The sci­en­tists and tech­ni­cians will then spend at least anoth­er 10 hours ana­lyz­ing and stor­ing each person’s data to…

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