The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering has awarded its highest honor this year to Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Health Sciences and Technology in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. Brown, who is also an […]
Category: Neuroscience
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An optimized solution for face recognition
The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of individuals. With artificial intelligence, computers can now recognize faces with a similar efficiency — and neuroscientists at MIT’s […]
Study finds neurons that encode the outcomes of actions
When we make complex decisions, we have to take many factors into account. Some choices have a high payoff but carry potential risks; others are lower risk but may have a lower reward associated with them. A new study from MIT sheds light on the part of the brain that helps us make these types […]
How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut
Five strategies to strengthen your sixth sense.
New MRI probe can reveal more of the brain’s inner workings
Using a novel probe for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), MIT biological engineers have devised a way to monitor individual populations of neurons and reveal how they interact with each other. Similar to how the gears of a clock interact in specific ways to turn the clock’s hands, different parts of the brain interact to […]
Singing in the brain
For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that lights up when we hear singing, but not other types of music. These neurons, found in the auditory cortex, appear to respond to the specific combination of voice and music, but not to either regular speech or instrumental […]
Can machine-learning models overcome biased datasets?
Artificial intelligence systems may be able to complete tasks quickly, but that doesn’t mean they always do so fairly. If the datasets used to train machine-learning models contain biased data, it is likely the system could exhibit that same bias when it makes decisions in practice. For instance, if a dataset contains mostly images of […]
Dendrites may help neurons perform complicated calculations
Within the human brain, neurons perform complex calculations on information they receive. Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated how dendrites — branch-like extensions that protrude from neurons — help to perform those computations. The researchers found that within a single neuron, different types of dendrites receive input from distinct parts of the brain, and process […]