{"id":549,"date":"2017-12-29T20:57:23","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T10:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cognav.net\/?p=549"},"modified":"2017-12-29T20:58:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T10:58:55","slug":"brief-news-of-cognitive-navigation-2017-003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/?p=549","title":{"rendered":"Brief News of Cognitive Navigation (2017-003)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5><span style=\"font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #000000;\">1. How the brain keeps time<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">by Anne Trafton\u00a0December 4, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/mcgovern.mit.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/588x358MIT-Timing-Control-585x356.jpg\" width=\"585\" height=\"356\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">McGovern neuroscientists discover networks of neurons that stretch or compress their activity to control timing.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Timing is critical for playing a musical instrument, swinging a baseball bat, and many other activities.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Neuroscientists have come up with several models of how the brain achieves its exquisite control over timing, the most prominent being that there is a centralized clock, or pacemaker, somewhere in the brain that keeps time for the entire brain.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">However, a new study from MIT researchers provides evidence for an alternative timekeeping system that relies on the neurons responsible for producing a specific action. Depending on the time interval required, these neurons compress or stretch out the steps they take to generate the behavior at a specific time.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">The researchers focused their study on a brain loop that connects three regions: the dorsomedial frontal cortex, the caudate, and the thalamus.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">They found this distinctive neural pattern in the dorsomedial frontal cortex, which is involved in many cognitive processes, and the caudate, which is involved in motor control, inhibition, and some types of learning.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">However, in the thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, they found a different pattern: Instead of altering the speed of their trajectory, many of the neurons simply increased or decreased their firing rate, depending on the interval required.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">A key discovery was that this strategy only works if some of the neurons have nonlinear activity \u2014 that is, the strength of their output doesn\u2019t constantly increase as their input increases. Instead, as they receive more input, their output increases at a slower rate.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Jazayeri now hopes to explore further how the brain generates the neural patterns seen during varying time intervals, and also how our expectations influence our ability to produce different intervals.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">More info on <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"http:\/\/mcgovern.mit.edu\/news\/news\/how-the-brain-keeps-time-2\/\">MIT website<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Think more:<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">How to build the PNT(Positioning, Navigation, Time) inspired by the brain (positioning, navigation, time). <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Whether we can get inspiration from the mechanism of PNT in the brain for robot autonomous navigation?<\/span><\/p>\n<h5><strong><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">2. How we know where we are<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">BY\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/researchblog.duke.edu\/index.php\/author\/slh82duke-edu\/\">SARAH HAURIN<\/a>\u00a0ON\u00a0DECEMBER 4, 2017 Duke University<\/span><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 586px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/researchblog.duke.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/hippocampus.jpg\" width=\"586\" height=\"337\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The hippocampus is a key structure in formation of memories and includes cells that represent a person\u2019s environment.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">The brain is a personalized GPS. It can keep track of where you are in time and space without your knowledge.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Daniel Dombeck PhD, and his team of researchers at Northwestern University have been using a technique designed by Dombeck himself to figure out how exactly the brain knows where and when we are.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Dombeck and his colleague Mark Sheffield of the University of Chicago were interested in how we encode new environments in the hippocampus.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">When comparing the cells active in each different task, Dombeck and Heys found that the cells that encode time information are different from the cells that encode\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/spatial+information\/\">spatial information<\/a>. In other words, the cells that hold\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/information\/\">information<\/a>about where we are in time are separate from the ones that tell us where we are in space.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">More info on <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/researchblog.duke.edu\/index.php\/2017\/12\/04\/how-we-know-where-we-are\/\">Duke Research Blog<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h5><strong><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">3. Where am I? Our internal GPS<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">By <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebraininaction.com\/about-peter-moleman\/\">Peter Moleman<\/a> on 21 December 2017<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter \" src=\"https:\/\/www.thebraininaction.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/ill_2017_22_v.1_grid_memory.jpg\" width=\"621\" height=\"429\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">London taxi drivers are required to be able to drive to any given street in the city without using a map or navigator. They also have to know all the restaurants, post offices, shops and more in the whole of London before they get their licence.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">How do they manage all this? In our brain, there is an ingenious GPS (<strong>G<\/strong>lobal\u00a0<strong>P<\/strong>ositioning\u00a0<strong>S<\/strong>ystem),\u00a0much cleverer than the GPS in our smartphone.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">For our GPS, it is the hippocampus that is important. This is a structure, deep in the brain, which has the form of a sea horse or hippocampus.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">The map in our brain<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">A map connected to emotions and intentions<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Autobiographical memory and maps<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Our internal GPS is therefore much more advanced than GPS on a smartphone. It is fully integrated with our memory, emotions, intentions and goal-directed behaviour.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">More info on <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thebraininaction.com\/gps\/\">The Brain in Action<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h5><strong><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">4. Robotics researchers track autonomous underground mining vehicles<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">By Prof. Michael Milford at QUT on 12th December 2017\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 596px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.qut.edu.au\/news\/news-image?image=097859_v5.jpg\" width=\"596\" height=\"335\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Professor Michael Milford led a team to help autonomous vehicles see through mazes of underground tunnels.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">QUT robotics researchers have developed new technology to equip underground mining vehicles to navigate autonomously through dust, camera blur and bad lighting.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">Using mathematics and biologically-inspired algorithms, the technology uses vehicle-mounted cameras to track the location of the vehicle in underground tunnels to within metres.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">They have developed a positioning system that uses cameras rather than lasers, based on more than a decade of research in biologically-inspired navigation technology.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">They developed a system which could intelligently evaluate the usefulness of the images coming in from the camera \u2013 and disregard ones that were blurry, dusty, or that were washed out from incoming vehicle lights.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif;\">More info on <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.qut.edu.au\/news?id=126057\">QUT website<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1. How the brain keeps time by Anne Trafton\u00a0December 4, 2017 McGovern neuroscientists discover networks of neurons that stretch or compress their activity to control timing. Timing is critical for playing a musical instrument, swinging a baseball bat, and many other activities. Neuroscientists have come up with several models of how the brain achieves its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[138,208,204,206,207,205],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":551,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions\/551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}