Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times explores new MIT research into how the brain links memories with positive and negative emotions. “Recording memory is not like playing a tape recorder, but it is a creative process -- sometimes even leading to an entirely false memory,” explains Prof. Susumu Tonegawa.
Boston Magazine reporter Andrea Timpano writes about how MIT researchers have developed a technique to reverse the emotions associated with specific memories in mice. The new technique uses light to manipulate brain cells and control neuron activity.
Wired reporter Katie Collins writes about how MIT student Ben Harvatine designed a sensor to help detect potential concussions in athletes. The ‘Jolt’ device can be clipped to head-worn athletic equipment and vibrates to warn the athlete when a dangerous impact is detected.
Roberto Scalese of Boston.com reports on the rollercoaster built and designed by MIT students to celebrate the start of the academic year.
Shannon McMahon reports for Boston.com about a new course, offered through MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, focused on social media and online forums like Reddit.
Alexis Madrigal writes for The Atlantic about Professor Nicholas Roy’s work in leading the development of a delivery drone for Google. In mid-August, Roy and his colleagues conducted test flights of the drone in Australia.
Writing for The New Yorker, Patrick House examines Professor Pawan Sinha’s work with sight restoration. “A remarkable thing about the brain’s processing capabilities is that, even with less than perfect image quality, it can extract a great deal of meaning about the visual world,” says Sinha of the benefits of sight restoration surgery.
Emily Tamkin of Slate writes about how MIT scientists have developed a technique to manipulate the emotional associations linked with memories in mice. “Scientists are excited by the potential impact these findings could have on, for example, treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder,” writes Tamkin.
In a piece for The Washington Post, Jay Van Bavel and Mina Cikara highlight a new paper co-authored by MIT Professor Rebecca Saxe and Dr. Emile Bruneau that examines public displays of schadenfreude, in which people exhibit pleasure at others’ pain. The researchers found that such behavior is a consequence of basic group dynamics.
Boston Magazine reporter Steve Annear writes about the course being offered at MIT this spring on the complexities of social media and online forums like Reddit. “They are social and political objects shaped by people that then shape the people who use them,” Chris Peterson, an MIT researcher, admissions officer and co-leader of forums like Reddit.
Writing for Wired, Greg Miller explores new MIT research into the emotional association of memories. “This study and others like it are illuminating the neural mechanisms of memory in unprecedented detail, and showing that it’s possible to activate, alter, or even create memories just by tweaking the right neurons,” writes Miller.
Chris Michael writes for The Guardian about new work conducted as part of the MIT Social Computing Group’s “You Are Here” project that mapped rat sightings in four U.S. cities. The team used data from public service calls to create time-lapse maps of rats in New York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago.
Brady Dale writes for Fortune about how researchers in Professor Harry Asada’s group are working on developing a robot that can act as an extra set of limbs for factory workers. The machine would conduct the less-skilled tasks in a two-person job, freeing up the other worker.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Feltman examines how MIT researchers have uncovered the brain circuitry that links memories to emotion and how to manipulate it. In rodent tests, “neurons that had once conjured up fearful memories had been switched to pleasant ones,” writes Feltman of the MIT study.
Gautam Naik of The Wall Street Journal writes about new MIT research showing how the brain associates memories with emotion and that circuits in the brain could potentially be rewired to change bad memories to good ones. "We identified the circuit, and we've showed that we can manipulate such circuits artificially," says Dr. Roger Redondo.