To put that in perspective, 10 megawatts is the kind of energy a small hydroelectric plant produces — 20 watts is only enough juice to power up a weak light bulb. Amazingly, your physical brain runs on this minuscule amount of power, and it’s not very efficient. However, embracing this inefficiency could be the key to creating computers that mimic the human brain.

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 per cent to 90 per cent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain’s noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $US100,000 to $US1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

So far Boahen has managed to squeeze a million neurons onto his new supercomputer compared to only 45,000 last year. By 2011, he hopes to have 64 million up and running, bringing the project to the equivalent of a mouse’s brain.

Ditching reliability and efficiency in favour of organised chaos flies in the face of everything that an engineer holds dear, but the approach does make sense — and reducing the power consumption is the key to upholding Moore’s law. But how will this development change our perception of what an artificially intelligent robot might become? Instead of some cold, logical machine that can think for itself, we might end up with robots that are just as stupid and flawed as we are. Think about it. [Discover Mag via PopSci]

The full story is over at Wired, and is quite interesting, but one of the effects achieved was to basically reverse Parkinson’s disease in mice. You should head over to find more, including what they’ll do to get around the need to thread fibre through your skull. [Wired]

What researchers did to come to those conclusions is generate a “small electrical current in the brains of 14 healthy volunteers using scalp electrodes. The current increased the activity of normal beta waves”. Bit freaky, but those folks volunteered for the research. What’s truly freaky is this:

The current increased the activity of normal beta waves, and slowed the volunteers’ reaction times by 10 percent.

So, how is all of this good news for Parkinson’s patients? This study and result might actually lead to improvements on already existing “brain pacemaker” by using “oscillating current that more closely mimics normal brain waves, as opposed to constant brain stimulation”. Those “brain pacemakers” help limit involuntary movements as well as improving on the ability to make voluntary ones. Here’s hoping that this research will continue to improve the quality of life for those suffering from Parkinson’s and similar degenerative disorders. [Discover]

Photo by Journal of Evolution and Technology

Using an BM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors, the folks at the Blue Brain Project are creating simulations to figure out exactly how our brains work. So far they’ve got a “model of ‘tens of thousands’ of neurons” and lofty goals:

Ultimately, the aim would be to extract that representation and project it so that researchers could see directly how a brain perceives the world.

But as well as advancing neuroscience and philosophy, the Blue Brain project has other practical applications.

For example, by pooling all the world’s neuroscience data on animals – to create a “Noah’s Ark”, researchers may be able to build animal models.

“We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever,” said Professor Markram.

It may also give researchers new insights into diseases of the brain.

“There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder,” he told the audience.

The project may give insights into new treatments, he said.

[BBC News]

This means both developers at large studios as well as dudes in their basement can make programs and games that do things with the data generated by the headset. And you generate data just by thinking a certain way.

What kind of stuff can these developers do? Well, for larger companies they can make this an additional controller to supplement their normal games, such as reloading just by concentrating or lifting boxes and “setting crap on fire.” Independent developers can make weird one-off games that can really stretch the limits of what the Neurosky Mindset can read from your brain. Or porn games. [Neurosky]

Mind Flex is a game in which the participant wears a headset that scans brainwaves with the hopes of controlling a mousetrap-like board. If the user can concentrate hard enough, they can activate a fan that will push a ball through a series of hoops. So the end product, on sale later this year for $US80, is really taking a simple technological concept (brain activity) and skinning it with a complicated-looking function (fans, balls, hoops, circles of fire, etc). But much like a similar game called Brainball, it’s still probably a parlour trick that excites a crowd. [Telegraph via gadgetreview]

The tech, called diffusion spectrum imaging, takes current data from MRI scans and analyses it for the passage of water molecules along the individual neuron connections in the brain. It then processes it to spit out the 3D maps. It’s possible to do on live subjects (like the human brain image above), but more detail can be achieved by scanning non-living samples for up to 24 hours.

Doctors are using the new images to better understand our brain’s infinitely complicated wiring, and to avoid important neural nets during surgeries. More including 3D model animations (awesome) at: [Technology Review]

The technology is described as an example of “neuromorphic engineering”—hardware and software that tries to emulate human intelligence. Basically, the binoculars point out objects that our brains might have noticed, but not fully processed. The subconscious can detect multiple things at once, but the conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. By collecting data using human eyes and then passing the data back to the brain, the binoculars more or less add a second processing loop.

One possible problem: How to fine-tune it so that the binoculars don’t just pick up on useless, distracting noise. Brains look for patterns in everything, and will sometimes find them even where they don’t exist (i.e. Astrology). What if for every rocket launcher it did notice before us, it also pointed out how one specific mountain range in the distance looks like your mother-in-law’s face? [Slashdot via Gizmag]

The device would sense its way in, using MEMS motors to carefully push in multiple electrodes into the brain and detecting electrical activity at their tips. When the system senses an activity spike, the robotic probe would adjust microscopically, and then either stay put or move on to find a better signal. The micro-mechanical part is still in development, but the team says the software side of the device (that would enable it to find the right neurons and adjust the probes locations if signals faded) is all but complete. It uses an algorithm inspired by one the US military uses to track aircraft.

It’s heady stuff, but apparently a real Matrix-esque brain probe is a long way away, as even this first-gen version of direct neural interfacing is “far off” from a ready-to-insert in brain device according to Wolf. [Make via Medgadget]