A company that makes an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) has been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration to run a clinical trial with human patients. Synchron plans to start an early feasibility study of its Stentrode implant later this year at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York with six subjects. The company said it will assess the device's "safety and efficacy in patients with severe paralysis."

If you thought mind control was only for sci-fi characters like X-Men's Professor Xavier, think again. A bioelectronics company will soon launch U.S. clinical trials of brain implants that allow patients with conditions like paralysis to control digital devices...with their minds.New York City-based Synchron said Wednesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared its device for testing in human patients, putting the futuristic technology on the cusp of heading to market. Synchron beat out scrambling competitors to reach this stage — namely Elon Musk's Neuralink.

A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Posted on July 13, 2021 by Michael Edward Johnson    

STV is Qualia Research Institute‘s candidate for a universal theory of valence, first proposed in Principia Qualia (2016). The following is a brief discussion of why existing theories are unsatisfying, what STV says, and key milestones so far.

The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them.

A Neuron’s Sense of Timing Encodes Information in the Human Brain
We like to think of brains as computers: A physical system that processes inputs and spits out outputs. But, obviously, what’s between your ears bears little resemblance to your laptop.
Computer scientists know the intimate details of how computers store and process information because they design and build them. But neuroscientists didn’t build brains, which makes them a bit like a piece of alien technology they’ve found and are trying to reverse engineer.
At this point, researchers have catalogued the components fairly well. We know the brain is a vast and intricate network of cells called neurons that communicate by way of electrical and chemical signals. What’s harder to figure out is how this network makes sense of the world.
To do that, scientists try to tie behavior to activity in the brain by listening to the chatter of its neurons firing. If neurons in a region get rowdy when a person is eating chocolate, well, those cells might be processing taste or directing chewing. This method has mostly focused on the frequency at which neurons fire—that is, how often they fire in a given period of time.
But frequency alone is an imprecise measure. For years, research in rats has suggested that when neurons fire relative to their peers—during navigation of spaces in particular—may also encode information. This process, in which the timing of some neurons grows increasingly out of step with their neighbors, is called “phase precession.”....

We spliced brain data from natural image viewing into a deep convolutional network (DCNN) and it categorised the things the owner of the brain was looking at.

URL/Links:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.28.450213v1

An organism’s survival can depend on its ability to recall and navigate to spatial locations associated with rewards, such as food or a home. Accumulating research has revealed that computations of reward and its prediction occur on multiple levels across a complex set of interacting brain regions, including those that support memory and navigation. However, how the brain coordinates the encoding, recall and use of reward information to guide navigation remains incompletely understood. In this Review, we propose that the brain’s classical navigation centres — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex — are ideally suited to coordinate this larger network by representing both physical and mental space as a series of states.

'Social' Mitochondria, Whispering Between Cells, Influence Health
Mitochondria appear to communicate and cooperate with one another, both within and between cells. Biologists are only just beginning to understand how and why.