Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia

SummarySynesthesia is a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality causes unusual experiences in a second, unstimulated modality. Although long treated as a curiosity, recent research with a combination of phenomenological, behavioral, and neuroimaging methods has begun to identify the cognitive and neural basis of synesthesia. Here, we review this literature with an emphasis on grapheme-color synesthesia, in which viewing letters and numbers induces the perception of colors. We discuss both the substantial progress that has been made in the past fifteen years and some open questions. In particular, we focus on debates in the field relating to the neural basis of synesthesia, including the relationship between synesthesia and attention and the role of meaning in synesthetic colors. We propose that some, but probably not all, of these differences can be accounted for by differences in the synesthetes studied and discuss some methodological implications of these individual differences

The role of Botanic Gardens in the Conservation of Wild and Native Flora

The present study highlights the role of botanic gardens in the conservation of wild and native floristic elements. It is observed that, there is a total of 33 species of plants belonging to 26 families and 28 genera. Out of 33 species, 19-species are conserved asex-situ and 14-species by in-situ methods

Detection and localization of audio event for home surveillance using CRNN

Safety and security have been a prime priority in people’s lives, and having a surveillance system at home keeps people and their property more secured. In this paper, an audio surveillance system has been proposed that does both the detection and localization of the audio or sound events. The combined task of detecting and localizing the audio events is known as Sound Event Localization and detection (SELD). The SELD in this work is executed through Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) architecture. CRNN is a stacked layer of convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN) and fully connected neural network (FNN). The CRNN takes multichannel audio as input, extracts features and does the detection and localization of the input audio events in parallel. The SELD results obtained by CRNN with the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and with long short-term memory (LSTM) unit are compared and discussed in this paper. The SELD results of CRNN with LSTM unit gives 75% F1 score and 82.8% frame recall for one overlapping sound. Therefore, the proposed audio surveillance system that uses LSTM unit produces better detection and overall performance for one overlapping sound

An “off-the shelf” Synthetic Membrane to Simplify Regeneration of Damaged Corneas

yesOur overall aim is to develop a synthetic off-the-shelf alternative to human amniotic membrane which is currently used for delivering cultured limbal stem cells to the cornea in patients who suffer scarring of the cornea because of the loss of limbal stem cells. We have recently reported that both cultured cells and limbal explants grow well on electrospun Poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) (44 kg/mol) with a 50:50 ratio of lactide and glycolide and sterilized with γ-irradiation. Prior to undertaking a clinical study our immediate aim now is to achieve long term storage of the membranes in convenient to use packaging. Membranes were electrospun from Poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) (44 kg/mol) with a 50:50 ratio of lactide and glycolide and sterilized with γ-irradiation and then stored dry (with desiccant) for several months at -80°C and -20°C , Room temperature (UK and India), 37°C and 50°C. We explored the contribution of vacuum sealing and the use of a medical grade bag (PET/Foil/LDPE) to achieve a longer shelf life. Confirmation of membranes being suitable for clinical use was obtained by culturing tissue explants on membranes post storage. When scaffolds were stored dry the rate of breakdown was both temperature and time dependent. At -20°C and -80°C there was no change in fiber diameter over 18 months of storage, and membranes were stable for 12 months at 4°C while at 50°C (above the transition temperature for PLGA) scaffolds lost integrity after several weeks. The use of vacuum packaging and a medical grade bag both improved the storage shelf-life of the scaffolds. The impact of temperature on storage is summarized beneath. We report that this synthetic membrane can be used as an off-the-shelf or-out-of-the freezer alternative to the amniotic membrane for corneal regeneration

Motion integration using competitive priors

Psychophysical experiments show that humans are better at perceiving rotation and expansion than translation [5][9]. These findings are inconsistent with standard models of motion integration which predict best performance for translation. To explain this discrepancy, our theory formulates motion perception at two levels of inference: we first perform model selection between the competing models (e.g. translation, rotation, and expansion) and then estimate the velocity using the selected model. We define novel prior models for smooth rotation and expansion using techniques similar to those in the slow-and-smooth model [23] (e.g. Green functions of differential operators). The theory gives good agreement with the trends observed in four human experiments