For decades, the transistor has been the building block of electronic devices, from computers to smartphones. It has seen little change, but a team of researchers at IBM has given the transistor a major makeover, and it may enable the company to build computers that function more like the way the human brain works.

If it pans out, IBM could use the technology to build chips that are highly efficient and use much less electrical power. That could lead to a revolution in mobile devices, which today are bound by short battery lives and electrical inefficiency. The whole process is not unlike the charged electrical fluids sloshing around in our brains. If the brain can do it, an artificially crafted material might be able to do it too.

The new technology is based on materials called “correlated electron oxides,” which can be combined with an ionic liquid, or a mixture where half of the molecules carry a positive charge and half are negative. When you apply a tiny ionic voltage to the liquid, the charged particles move to opposite sides of the surface of the oxide material. The charge leaves the oxide and goes into the liquid, changing its conductive state from an insulator to a metal, or from something that does not conduct electricity to something that does.

And it maintains its electrical state until another charge is applied. That part of the research is new and is particularly encouraging. IBM believes it can create non-volatile memory, or chips that save data whether electricity is on or off. It can also make logic chips that would use less power than today’s silicon-based semiconductor chips, which are the brains of everything electronic.

Big Blue is disclosing the breakthrough in the journal Science today. Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow and lead researcher on the project at IBM, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the small team of researchers had been working for a couple of years.

“We are using tiny currents of ions of atoms generated by these electrical signals to change the state of matter of this oxide material,” he said. “It is a means to build low-energy, highly efficient devices by turning on and off their conducting state. We turn this material into a metal and maintain it without any need to supply power.”

That latter part is remarkable, as silicon chips require constant voltages to function.

Chips that use electricity have been evolving for decades, with progress marked by Moore’s Law, named after Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore, who predicted in 1965 that the number of components on a chip would double every year or so. That prediction has been very accurate, but experts worry that progress will slow as semiconductor technology runs into fundamental limits. IBM is working on new solutions, including traditional semiconductor chips that process data like the human brain does.

Parkin said that by applying a charged ionic liquid electrolyte to a substance, the team has been able to create a stable insulating and conducting state of an oxide material. This discovery has opened a way for making oxide-based transistors and logic gates.

“This is an alternative to a slowdown in Moore’s Law,” Parkin said. “Our inspiration is the brain and how it operates. It is full of liquids and ionic currents. We could build more brain-like devices.”

The picture at right shows a drawing of a nanofluidic circuit, which operates by passing the green ionic fluid through conduits fabricated on top of the orange planar oxide surface. When a voltage is applied to the liquid (the blue part), the yellow balls from the oxide surface in the liquid are metallized. When no voltage is applied, there is no ionic motion and the oxide surface is an insulator, which does not conduct electrons. Circuits can be dynamically formed on the surface of the oxide.

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Duke researchers have electronically linked the brains of a pair of rats using the world’s first “brain-to-brain” interface. With one rat stationed in Durham, N.C., and the other in Natal, Brazil, the rodents could share tactile and motor information and work together to solve simple puzzles.

This brings the concept of Internet connectivity to a new level.

“These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication linkage between brains, and that the decor brain is working as a pattern-recognition device,” said professor Miguel Nicolelis in a paper in Scientific Reports. “So basically, we are creating what I call an organic computer. […] We are creating a single central nervous system made up of two rat brains.”

Dubbed “brain-net,” the experiment shows that it was possible to create a “workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.” The research team tested the hypothesis by training pairs of rats to solve problems, like pressing a lever in response to a light to obtain water.

One of the rats was the “encoder” animal and the other was the “decoder,” and their brains were connected using electrodes. The encoder rat received the visual cue to press the lever, and this brain activity was “translated into a pattern of electrical stimulation” that was delivered into the brain of the decoder rat. That rat had no visual cues of its own but was still able to press the correct lever and get a drink.

The brain-to-brain interface goes two-ways. The encoder rat did not receive the reward if the decoder rat made the wrong choice, which led to “behavioral collaboration.”

“We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net,” Nicolelis said. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.” Such a connection might even mean that one animal would incorporate the other’s sense of “self.”

Nicolelis’ laboratory can record brain signals from almost 2,000 brain cells at once, which is apparently an unprecedented number. He is a professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and psychology and neuroscience at Duke. Read more at www.nicolelislab.net and check out this video:

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The insides of computer systems are often portrayed in science fiction movies as vast arcologies of virtual structures, with whizzing electrical impulses flashing through them. As it turns out, our brains might not look very different from our dreams of artificial computing entities.

For the first time, Japanese scientists captured video of a thought being formed, and it looks pretty much like miniature lightning tracing its way through a meshed structure of neurons:

Of course, this is not a human brain that mad scientists exported from a skull and sliced up in the pursuit of scientific information. Rather, this is a the brain of a baby zebrafish — and it wasn’t even harmed in the experiment. Researchers chose this creature because in their embryonic and larval states, zebrafish have the wonderful property of being almost completely transparent.

The adult of the species is not, alas, transparent

The scientists dosed the baby fish with fluorescencing agents that glow when neurons are activated, then induced a paramecium — a tiny protozoa about 200 micrometers in length — to swim by, causing the zebrafish to perk up and think about a snack.

That caused neural impulses to be fired off in the zebrafish’s “optic tectum,” a region of the midbrain. Which the Japanese researchers then captured video of, and, naturally, uploaded to YouTube, solving once and for all the perplexing question: what do fish think of?

Mostly, it appears, lunch. Which is not too different from humans, perhaps.

Image credits: D o m o n k o S via photopin cc, Akira Muto, Masamichi Ohkura, Gembu Abe, Junichi Nakai, and Koichi Kawakami, hat tip: Gizmodo

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Though Albert Einstein is long gone, the great physicist’s brain lives on. No, not zombie-style; slides of the man’s brain came out in an iPad app form today for anyone to study like a scientist.

According to the Associated Press, the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Chicago converted Einstein’s brain from a collection of hundreds of aging slides to the digitized versions used in this new iPad app. Thomas Harvey created the slides after the great scientist died roughly 60 years ago. The 1950s-era slides are in fragile shape, and today’s researchers fear they will be destroyed or lost, prompting the conversion.

Source: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nmhmc-harvey/id555722456?ls=1&mt=8

Einstein’s brain on the iPad app.

The app enables scientists (or anyone else) to take the same look at Einstein’s brain as if they were looking through a microscope at the slides themselves. It is available in the App Store for $9.99. The hope is that someone, somewhere will be able to unlock the genius behind Einstein through his brain. It also widely distributes his brain, where it was only available to those who could get their hands on the physical slides.

The Associated Press notes that because we do not have images of the full Einstein brain, we do not know from where on the brain the slides were taken. For now, scientists are just satisfied that a digital version of his brain exists.

via The Associated Press; Einstein top image via Shutterstock

That short clip is part of a documentary film, Alive Inside, which shows how personalized music can completely transform non-responsive, uninterested, almost vegetative seniors.

In Henry’s own words: “It gives me the feeling of love … romance!”

In fact, famous neurologist and author Oliver Sacks – if you’ve ever watched Awakenings, the movie with Robin Williams and Robert de Niro in which inmates of an asylum go quite astonishingly sane, you’ve seen his story — concurs, saying Henry has been “quickened, brought to life.”

By music? How?

The story starts more than six years ago, when Dan Cohen, a social worker who had spent most of his working life in technology companies, noticed the lack of technology available to seniors.

“I saw that iPods were ubiquitious — everyone has one — but that there were none in nursing homes,” Cohen told me when we spoke last week. “We talk about digitally bypassed people, sometimes, but old people are the extreme.”

In fact, there are about 18,000 retirement and old age homes in North America, almost all of which have basically no computers, no iPads, no WIFI … none of the things that many of us who are younger and in good health take for granted.

On a whim, Cohen brought iPods into a care home.

“I personalized the music to what people like, or what they knew when they were young,” Cohen says. “Every couple of weeks I’d pull off songs they didn’t like and add ones they did.”

Eventually, residents had about 150 songs that they knew and loved on their iPods.

“It gives me the feeling of love”

Cohen was shocked at the results. Seniors who had withdrawn into themselves became animated. Elders who didn’t speak started singing. People who became agitated and upset every evening calmed down. It was almost like dead people coming back to life.

He started telling others about the program.

The Atlantic Institute of Aging in New Brunswick, Canada tried music therapy and confirmed Cohen’s findings. They started giving personalized music to seniors and, Cohen says, found that with music, “seniors who don’t talk, talk. People who don’t move, start moving. And seniors who are depressed get happier.”

Prominent neurologists like Dan Levitin and Oliver Sacks got involved, checking and confirming that something real was happening.

According to brain experts, there are actually multiple things happening when seniors seem to “come back alive.”  Music we hear between the ages of 10 and 16 becomes associated with the events of that time: puberty, hormonal changes, first loves, best friends, and more.

Then that music becomes some of the most deeply embedded memories in our neural networks. Memories that are not just stored in one single location but retained, seemingly, globally.

Music is unique in the brain

“That’s what’s different about music in the brain … and it’s unique. It’s not located in one spot,” says Cohen. “That’s why they use music for people who lose speech … they can’t speak but they can sing.”

One example is American congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head and lost the ability to speak. Music helped her regain the ability to sing and then to speak, by training the other side of her brain to talk.

And music has multiple impacts, brain researchers and neurologists have found. One of them is reducing blood pressure.

“Alzheimers often causes agitation around sundown,” says Cohen. “That’s why families put them into an institution — they can’t cope.”

But music, because it reduces blood pressure, reduces agitation. And elders can then stay home with their families, which is beneficial for caregivers as well, Cohen notes.

A graduate student helping out in a Tulane, Louisiana care home tried music therapy with 15 dementia patients and found that every one, uncommunicative before, starting talking to her.

“In fact, they were so talkative that when re-tested for dementia, they could not be scored: the dementia had receded so much,” Cohen told me.

MP3 players: not isolating

One of the criticisms of portable music systems since Walkmans is isolation: kids don’t interact with their peers or families anymore.

“When I started doing this,” said Cohen, “people were annoyed, saying that I was going to isolate seniors even more by putting headphones on them.”

Running an experiment with a foundation that gave iPods to a 200-senior test group, however, proved quite the opposite. The feedback from the professionals included not a single report of increased isolation, and a flood of stories of increased socialization, memories returning, and more conversation.

Music & Memory foundation

Early results were so encouraging that Cohen started a foundation, Music & Memory, to bring music to more elders.

The mission is to improve the quality of life for the elderly through personalized music. 40 or more care homes are already running music programs, created with the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

But cost is a usually a problem:

“A thousand dollars for medicines — that’s no problem,” Cohen says with a trace of a smile in his voice. “But one $40 music player … that’s a problem.”

So Music & Memory runs iPod donation drives, accepts shipments of people’s old iPods, and solicits cash donations to buy music players.

But one thing did more to raise the foundation’s profile than any other effort: a clip from a movie documenting the effects of music on aging people. The Henry clip, in fact, that went viral, with six million views in four days.

“In some sense, Henry is restored to himself,” Dr. Oliver Sacks says in the clip. The music helps to “animate, organize, and bring a sense of identity back to people who are out of it, otherwise.”

Alive Inside and Kickstarter

Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennet is producing the documentary Alive Inside, which this clip comes from. The movie follows the story of Cohen and his patients and the effects of music on formerly quiet, almost vegetative seniors.

When he showed an early version for senior officials of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the response was incredible. The corporation, the largest municipal health care organization in the U.S., almost immediately decided to pilot the music program for 3,000 patients.

To finish the film, however, Rossato-Bennet needs $50,000 — mostly for music rights to use the songs that patients revive to. So he’s started a Kickstarter project to raise the funds.

Currently the project has eight days to go and still needs $30,000.

When finished — and Cohen is adamant the film will be finished, Kickstarter success or not — the group will take it on a film festival circuit.

Because, in Henry’s words, “right now the world needs to come into music.”

Image credits: KALABUKHAVA IRYNA/ShutterStock, Attem/ShutterStock