CNN.com - Warriors of the future will 'taste' battlefield - Apr 25, 2006

CNN.com - Warriors of the future will 'taste' battlefield - Apr 25, 2006

"By routing signals from helmet-mounted cameras, sonar and other equipment through the tongue to the brain, they hope to give elite soldiers superhuman senses similar to owls, snakes and fish."

United Press International - NewsTrack - 'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

Scientists confirm the function of the creatively named Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) of the brain: United Press International - NewsTrack - 'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

French neuroscientists have ended a long controversy, confirming a specific area of the human brain plays a causal role in our ability to recognize words.

Humans have an uncanny ability to skim through text, instantly recognizing words by their shape -- even though writing developed only about 6000 years ago, long after humans evolved.

The New 'Mad' Scientists

Belgian neuroscientists studied what happened when test subjects stayed up all night after playing Duke Nukem. The answer: Sleep deprivation made it harder to remember the layout of the game. Annalee Newitz has the scoop.

AlterNet: MediaCulture: The New 'Mad' Scientists: "It turns out that sleeping allows the brain to reorganize our spatial memories, moving them from the short-term memory zone of the hippocampus to the long-term memory zone of the striatum (an area of the brain also associated with body movement). So, if you stay up all night killing aliens and go to work or school the next day, you won't remember very well the layout of the game you played."

More details from the BBC: Duke Nukem sheds light on brain

Singularity Summit at Stanford May 13

Stanford is hosting an event that will feature such visionaries as Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstadter speaking about the future of human intelligence--and superintelligence. Expect lots of big thinking, grandiose vision-making, mind-bending futurism, and at least one attempt to have someone appear remotely via a life-size holographic display.

The Singularity Summit at Stanford: "The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California.

The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the 'Singularity' -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario."

Human brains are still evolving.

Human brains are still evolving:

University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn recently published the results of a study demonstrating that two key genes connected to brain size are currently under rapid selection in populations throughout the globe.

"The jury is still out on what this means because we aren't entirely sure what these genes do," said Lahn. "It's possible they just control size and shape of the brain, rather than cognition. But the data is pretty compelling that the brain is evolving."

Some radical thinkers suggest human evolution needs to move even faster, with a little help from science.

"Biological evolution is too slow for the human species," said Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author of The Singularity Is Near. "Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust."

More information in this Wired News article by Annalee Newitz: Getting Evolution Up to Speed

Why Some Kids Are Smarter - Technology Review

Scientists studied kids over a period of several years, doing MRI scanning of their brains periodically. They found that the prefrontal cortexes of smarter kids started out thinner, but grew more rapidly between ages 5 and 12 than the cortexes of kids with ordinary intelligence. (In this case, "intelligence" is taken to mean how well the children scored on a standard IQ test.) The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Why Some Kids Are Smarter - Technology Review

Diffusion tensor imaging

Technology Review: Diffusion Tensor Imaging - Kevin Lim's research is helping scientists understand schizophrenia

The Lie Behind Lie Detectors

Wired News commentator Jennifer Granick examines the shortcomings of current polygraph tests, which are highly unreliable, and compares them to the emerging field of fMRI lie detection.

Under laboratory conditions, fMRI technology might be 90 percent accurate in determining whether individuals in a test group of Americans are lying about taking a watch or a ring. But it's useless for employee screening, convicting the guilty, identifying terrorists at the airport or separating innocents from enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay -- at least at the moment.

At some point soon, these high-tech lie detectors will be cheap, accurate, portable and unobtrusive enough to replace the polygraph in incident investigations. But we are a long way from reading minds.

Wired News: The Lie Behind Lie Detectors