Anatomy of word and sentence meaning

Reading and listening involve complex psychological processes that recruit many brain areas. The anatomy of processing English words has been studied by a variety of imaging methods. Although there is widespread agreement on the general anatomical areas involved in comprehending words, there are still disputes about the computations that go on in these areas. Examination of the time relations (circuitry) among these anatomical areas can aid in under-standing their computations. In this paper we concentrate on tasks which involve obtaining the meaning of a word in isolation or in relation to a sentence. Our current data support a finding in the literature that frontal semantic areas are active well before posterior areas. We use the subject’s attention to amplify relevant brain areas involved either in semantic classification or in judging the relation of the word to a sentence in order to test the hypothesis that frontal areas are concerned with lexical semantics while posterior areas are more involved in comprehension of propositions that involve several words

Genes2Networks: Connecting Lists of Proteins by Using Background Literature-based Mammalian Networks

In recent years, in-silico literature-based mammalian protein-protein interaction network datasets have been developed. These datasets contain binary interactions extracted manually from legacy experimental biomedical research literature. Placing lists of genes or proteins identified as significantly changing in multivariate experiments, in the context of background knowledge about binary interactions, can be used to place these genes or proteins in the context of pathways and protein complexes.
Genes2Networks is a software system that integrates the content of ten mammalian literature-based interaction network datasets. Filtering to prune low-confidence interactions was implemented. Genes2Networks is delivered as a web-based service using AJAX. The system can be used to extract relevant subnetworks created from “seed” lists of human Entrez gene names. The output includes a dynamic linkable three color web-based network map, with a statistical analysis report that identifies significant intermediate nodes used to connect the seed list. Genes2Networks is available at http://actin.pharm.mssm.edu/genes2networks.
Genes2Network is a powerful web-based software application tool that can help experimental biologists to interpret high-throughput experimental results used in genomics and proteomics studies where the output of these experiments is a list of significantly changing genes or proteins. The system can be used to find relationships between nodes from the seed list, and predict novel nodes that play a key role in a common function

Attentional Networks and Consciousness

The term consciousness is an important one in the vernacular of the western literature in many fields. It is no wonder that scientists have assumed that consciousness will be found as a component of the human brain and that we will come to understand its neural basis. However, there is rather little in common between consciousness as the neurologist would use it to diagnose the vegetative state, how the feminist would use it to support raising male consciousness of the economic plight of women and as the philosopher would use it when defining the really hard question of the subjective state of awareness induced by sensory qualities. When faced with this kind of problem it is usual to subdivide the term into more manageable perhaps partly operational definitions. Three meanings that capture aspects of consciousness are: (1) the neurology of the state of mind allowing coherent orientation to time and place (2) the selection of sensory or memorial information for awareness and (3) the voluntary control over overt responses. In each of these cases the mechanisms of consciousness overlap with one or more of the attentional networks that have been studied with the methods of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper we explore the overlap and discuss how to exploit the growing knowledge of attentional networks to constrain ideas of consciousness

Data compressor Patent

Description of system for recording and reading out data related to distribution of occurrence of plurality of event

Resting‐state fMRI detects the effects of learning in short term: A visual search training study

Can resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) detect the impact of learning on the brain inthe short term? To test this possibility, we have combined task-FC and rs-FC tested before andafter a 30-min visual search training. Forty-two healthy adults (20 men) divided into no-contactcontrol and trained groups completed the study. We studied the connectivity between fourdifferent regions of the brain involved in visual search: the primary visual area, the right poste-rior parietal cortex (rPPC), the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC), and the dorsalanterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Task-FC showed increased connectivity between the rPPCand rDLPFC and between the dACC and rDLPFC from pretraining to posttraining for boththe control group and the trained group, suggesting that connectivity between these areasincreased with task repetition. In rs-FC, we found enhanced connectivity between theseregions in the trained group after training, especially in those with better learning. Whole brainindependent component analyses did not reveal any change in main networks after training.These results imply that rs-FC may not only predict individual differences in task performance,but rs-FC might also serve to monitor the impact of learning on the brain after short periodsof cognitive training, localizing them in brain areas specifically involved in training

Demonstration of a quantile system for compression of data from deep space probes

Quantile system of data compression for space telemetr

Timing the Brain: Mental Chronometry as a Tool in Neuroscience

Mental chronometry, which has origins dating back over a century, seeks to measure the time course of mental operations in the human nervous syste

Developing poor connected brains

The study of the influence of material and social deprivation on the central nervous system (CNS) has been an issue of interest in the agenda of neuroscience since the first half of the twentieth century. In recent years, neuroscience has begun to take seriously that experience shapes the brain in important ways.Fil: Lipina, Sebastián Javier. Centro de Educación Médica e Investigaciones Clínicas "Norberto Quirno"; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Posner, Michael I.. University of Oregon; Estados Unidos. Weill Medical College; Estados Unido