Brain and cognitive sciences

James Gorman features the work of former MIT Professor Sebastian Seung. Gorman highlights Seung’s work with the citizen science game EyeWire at MIT. 

Reporting for Wired, Chris Higgins writes about how researchers from MIT have uncovered the mystery of how the human eye detects motion thanks to the efforts of thousands of people from around the world who played the citizen science computer game EyeWire.

NPR’s Joe Palca reports on EyeWire, a computer game developed by MIT researchers to help map nerve connections in the eye. Palca reports that over “120,000 citizen neuroscientists from 140 countries” played the game, helping to produce a map that shows that the eye’s retina detects motion.

“With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction,” writes Mo Costandi in an article for Nature about how MIT researchers have mapped neuron connections in the brain.

In a piece for The Guardian, Mo Costandi reports on how MIT researchers have mapped neural connections in the retina. “A large group of gamers, working with computational neuroscientists, has produced a wiring diagram of the nerve cell connections at the back of the eye, which may have solved the long-standing question of how cells in the retina detect motion,” Costandi writes.

Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes about how MIT researchers have mapped a neural circuit in the eye that helps detect movement. The researchers developed the map through EyeWire, a citizen science game developed at MIT that has users trace the path of neurons in the brain.

Francie Diep of Popular Science writes that researchers from MIT have discovered that a specific type of brain activity, associated with short-term memory, is present in animals and humans when solving complex tasks.