Brain Interactive Map

University of California at Berkeley did an interesting study called "Interactive map: how the brain sorts what we see". It shows how the brain is wired to put the categories of objects and actions we see daily and it organizes these groupings. 

Using fMRI they record the patients brain activity while showing 2 hours of movie trailers where each object and action of the movies were identified before. Measuring the blood flow in about 30.000 of Voxels (Volumetric Pixels), covering the entire cortex, it was possible to determine how each object and action affects those areas.

The final result was to formulate models that describe how the brain encodes visual information and responds during natural vision. 

Here it is a small video which I've made using the BrainViewer. 

If you have an old PC probably it will not be possible to use the online "BrainViewer" because some of the WebGL functions don’t exist in the video board.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.

OpenVibe 3D Voxel and Topographic Map

Voxel is an OpenVibe 3D plugin that shows how to display reconstructed brain activity through inverse model and voxel visualizer. It can be tested using demo file voxel-display.xml. 

Another scenario is the 3D topographic map that uses the interpolating potentials at the surface of the scalp, converting them to colours using a colour scale and mapping them over the surface of the scalp.

Here is an example created with raw data from EPOC. It shows in real-time 2D and 3D Topographic maps, Spectrum, Signal and Matrix Display, and also a Time-frequency map.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.

Biomedical Engineering Salary and Jobs

Biomedical Engineering is one of the highest offer/paid jobs in the world. The CNN Money based in PayScale.com it says that a median pay for an experienced worker in the field is around $6.500 (5.000€) / month and it can be $10.000 (7.500€) at the top career.

The sites SimplyHire and Job Search Money CNN show some of the supply jobs around the world. In the last 30 days 3.000 jobs were found in SimplyHire (an average of 100 jobs offer per day).

The Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme

The Champalimaud Neuroscience community is a research group from over 20 different countries to try to understand how the brain works. The "Ar" group using interactive projects wants to show to the people why science is important. 

Society, Adventures in illegal art, Mind Invaders, Think of a Numb3r, Food for Thought, Human 2.0, Creativity and Suspicious Coincidences in the Brain - are some of their very active scientific events.

The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown is located in Portugal near Belém.

Human Brain Project

The human brain has extraordinary functions and it is the most powerful computer imaginable. The Human Brain Project wants to start building a computer model of the brain and simulate its functions. It consists of a large international number of neuroscientists, physicists and other groups from the scientific community that aims to recreate the human brain inside a supercomputer with a budget of 1 Billion Euro.

As modern computers exploit ever-higher numbers of parallel computing elements, they face a power wall: power consumption rises with the number of processors, potentially to unsustainable levels. By contrast, the brain manages billions of processing units connected via kilometers of fibres and trillions of synapses, while consuming no more power than a light bulb. Understanding how it does this can provide the key not only to a completely new category of hardware but to a paradigm shift for computing as a whole, moving away from current models of “bit precise” computing towards new techniques that exploit the stochastic behavior of simple, very fast, low-power computing devices embedded in intensely recursive architectures. 

In short, the goal of the Human Brain Project is to build an infrastructure for future neuroscience, future medicine and future computing that will catalyze a global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its computational capabilities. The economic and industrial impact is potentially enormous.