How to do Brain reading robots

Brain reading robots might also be used by scientists to detect and diagnose brain diseases. As an example, what happens when a child or person with Down’s syndrome receives an incorrect diagnosis by medical professionals? The person’s parents are often unaware of the health problems their child is facing, which can cause further psychological problems. While brain readings could be used to monitor the children and find out if they are suffering from a rare genetic disease that affects the brain and cognitive functions, it could also alert medical professionals of the development of an illness.

'We’re extremely excited about our collaboration with NIFTI and the technology it’s making available,' says Keith Webster, Deputy Director at University of Rochester Medical Centres and Ph.D. candidate at NIFTI. 'This will allow us to develop machine learning techniques for a host of brain-related medical challenges, such as finding the earliest signs of mental disorders,er's Institute for Basic Science (IBS), South Korea.

In a previous study, IBS worked with the National Brain Institute, Korea, and Cornell University to discover how a brain perceives color based on visual experiences. As one of the study's participants, Choi Yimchung, reports, “The concept of color for me is not identical to the concept of color for others. I experience the world and my physical position from a different perspective and vision, and my perception of color is therefore different from yours. Color is more fundamental than shape. It’s an inseparable part of my perception of the world.”

In this study, the researchers concluded that the sense of color for each person is personal. What seems beautiful to one person may not be beautiful to the other, for example. The study aimed to understand how the brain distinguishes different colors to produce, and creates, “false colors.” The study revealed that the brain distinguishes false colors by considering three parameters: color value, shape and color mixtures.

In another recent study, researchers at NIFTI designed a new brain sensing technology that could detect a number of diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease. When a team of scientists performed a medical scan on 10 people, one of them suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. They found that the patients’ brain showed a greatly abnormal reaction to “white noise” stimuli, which were known to have the ability to detect diseases in the human brain.

A Research Assistant at NIFTI, Hyejin Kim, explains, “White noise is non-directional and the brain does not react to it normally. But Alzheimer’s patients have shown abnormal brain function by the skin conductance response, which, in turn, is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers discovered that the patients with Alzheimer’s have abnormal brain activity even when they were exposed to simple white noise. This supports our hypothesis that the ability to sense white noise may be a key feature of Alzheimer’s disease.”

After that, they increased the level of pain, then saw the patients react to the pain in the same way as the patients with Alzheimer’s disease. By the brain activity detected by the new technology, researchers were able to monitor the reactions of the patients when they were being exposed to different pain stimuli. This new technology might be able to detect Alzheimer's disease as early as possible.

The research was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.