Goto

Collaborating Authors

 kandel


Where is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?

Tee, James, Taylor, Desmond P.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Within the scientific research community, memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse - a hypothesis famously attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb. However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis, coined by psychologist Randy Gallistel. In this paper, we review a selection of key experimental evidence from both sides of the argument. We begin with Eric Kandel's studies on sea slugs, which provided the first evidence in support of the synaptic hypothesis. Next, we touch on experiments in mice by John O'Keefe (declarative memory and the hippocampus) and Joseph LeDoux (procedural fear memory and the amygdala). Then, we introduce the synapse as the basic building block of today's artificial intelligence neural networks. After that, we describe David Glanzman's study on dissociating memory storage and synaptic change in sea slugs, and Susumu Tonegawa's experiment on reactivating retrograde amnesia in mice using laser. From there, we highlight Germund Hesslow's experiment on conditioned pauses in ferrets, and Beatrice Gelber's experiment on conditioning in single-celled organisms without synapses (Paramecium aurelia). This is followed by a description of David Glanzman's experiment on transplanting memory between sea slugs using RNA. Finally, we provide an overview of Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler's experiment on DNA transfer of fear in mice from parents to offspring. We conclude with some potential implications for the wider field of psychology.


HeartVista Brings Artificial Intelligence to Cardiac MRI

#artificialintelligence

HeartVista is hoping to increase the use of CardiacMRI's. To achieve this goal, the Los Altos, CA-based company has developed the One Click Cardiac Package MRI software, which recently received FDA clearance. "It has been widely excepted in the clinical community and the scientific community that cardiac MRI is the gold standard for everything that you can almost do or diagnose in a cardiac setting," Itamar Kandel, HeartVista's CEO, told MD DI. "But the problem is that the actual scan itself is very complex; takes a lot of time, and takes a very high level of skill to even perform." He added, "You have this situation where the best technology is not approachable to the vast majority of the needs. The problem we came to solve is to bring this technology to the masses -to democratize Cardiac MRI." HeartVista's FDA-cleared Cardiac Package uses AI-assisted software to prescribe the standard cardiac views with just one click, and in as few as 10 seconds, while the patient breathes freely.


Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab - Issue 69: Patterns

Nautilus

The neuroscientist was in the art gallery and there were many things to learn. So Eric Kandel excitedly guided me through the bright lobby of the Neue Galerie New York, a museum of fin de siècle Austrian and German art, located in a Beaux-Art mansion, across from Central Park. The Nobel laureate was dressed in a dark blue suit with white pinstripes and red bowtie. I was dressed, well, less elegantly. Since winning a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, for uncovering the electrochemical mechanisms of memory, Kandel had been thinking about art. In 2012 and 2016, respectively, he published The Age of Insight and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, both of which could be called This Is Your Brain on Art. The Age of Insight detailed the rise of neuroscience out of the medical culture that surrounded Sigmund Freud, and focused on Gustav Klimt and his artistic disciples Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, whose paintings mirrored the age's brazen ideas about primal desires smoldering beneath conscious control. I'd invited Kandel to meet me at the Neue Galerie because it was the premier American home of original works by Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele. It was 2014 when we met and I had long been reading about neuroaesthetics, a newish school in neuroscience, and a foundation of The Age of Insight, where brain computation was enlisted to explain why and what in art turned us on. I was anxious to hear Kandel expound on how neuroscience could enrich art, as he had written, though I also came with a handful of doubts.


Want To Know What Technologies Are Coming In The Future? There's a Database For That

#artificialintelligence

Spider silk transformed into fiber for tissue reconstruction; paper that conducts electricity; renewable diesel fuel; and new techniques for regenerating aging or diseased skin. These are just a handful of examples from a new database of over 1,300 new technologies currently making their way through Israeli Technology Transfer Organizations [TTOs] associated with universities, research institutes, and medical institutions. The new searchable database is designed as a layer in Start-Up Nation Finder, a free-to-use innovation discovery platform from Start-Up Nation Central (SNC), an Israeli non-profit that connects businesses, governments, and organizations around the world to Israeli innovation. The new TTO layer gives users the ability to look over the horizon at emerging technologies in drug discovery, advanced materials science, gene sequencing, robotics, and other fields, through cataloguing the patents, companies, and researchers that are registered at 16 TTOs in Israel. SNC combined data from the TTOs themselves, the Israel Technology Transfer Network, and its own data from Start-Up Nation Finder.


What Sea Slugs Taught Us About Our Brain - Issue 44: Luck

Nautilus

When Leonid Moroz, a gregarious Russian-born neuroscientist and geneticist at the University of Florida, began studying ctenophores nearly a decade ago, he had a fairly simple goal in mind. He wanted to determine exactly where the blobby marine creatures--which are more commonly known as comb jellies because of the comb-like projections they use to swim--belonged on the tree of life. After spending several years sequencing ctenophores, Moroz and his team discovered that the animals were missing many of the genes found in the nervous system of other animals thought to be closely related, such as coral and actual jellyfish. That meant that they'd branched off on their own up to 550 million years ago and were potentially among the first animals on earth. "It was quite surprising to see," said Moroz, almost like stumbling on a group of aliens living in the sea.


Why Abstract Art Stirs Creativity in Our Brains - Facts So Romantic

Nautilus

Are art and science of distinctly different cultures? The former often seems fixated on human experience, the latter on physical processes. In his most recent book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, published this year, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel argues that such a separation no longer exists. The best-known abstractionists, like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Dan Flavin, and Willem de Kooning, Kandel writes, effectively created "new rules for visual processing." Abstract art, says Kandel, is therefore the key to understanding both how art and science inform one another, and together, they might open up entirely new ways of seeing and imagining.