Can you tell if a piece of fruit is ripe or overripe by sight alone? While dark bananas or green oranges obviously fail the optimal ripeness test, most of the time we need to employ other senses to help us decide. Squeezing, smelling, thumping, or tasting can help determine if the fruit is suitable for eating now, needs to ripen a bit or be tossed onto the compost heap.

Most of us take for granted this ability of our brains to mesh information from multiple senses into a cohesive whole. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of human intelligence to do this neural juggling act effortlessly, without having to think about it. No need to go back to fruit school each time we pack our lunch.

But even the most sophisticated intelligent machines struggle when it comes to perceiving and adapting to their environments. They can be reprogrammed to accomplish this sensory fusion, but that kind of defeats the idea of adaptability (and makes for lots of programming overtime, too.)

A group of European scientists have taken on the challenge of investigating how to teach intelligent machines perceive and adapt to their environments by simultaneously using multiple senses. (See Biology inspires perceptive machines. for a somewhat technical summary of their doings.)

The article details how the scientific team based its modeling on a sophisticated type of neural network based on something called spiking neurons. The team believes these types of circuits process information kind of like a biological brain might. And, if I'm reading it right, these types of circuits exploit a kind of neural plasticity:

Similarly, adaptation is another aspect of the biological model, known as plasticity, where data flows through new routes in the brain to add further resources to data capture. If repeated over time, this plasticity becomes learning, where well-travelled routes through the brain become established and reinforce the information that passes.

So, looks like theres lots of work to be done before the singularity arrives and we begin sending our intelligent agents out for fresh fruit.

For a take on the idea of machine perception and motion (among other things), have a look at Why Robots Fall Down.

Been experimenting again with designs for this blog. The old style looked like this. The new one you see here results from lots of reading and trying things out, and from trying out the demo version of StyleMaster CSS editor.

If you're ever looking for way to fill up lots of time, give coding up style sheets and html documents a try.

I've moved this blog to a new server, which seems to be working OK so far. There's also a new design using CSS stuff I've learned, mainly from the clearly written books of Dan Cederholm. And there's a new content management system behind it all in Tinderbox: hard to learn, but man is it ever flexible.

This blog continues in the spirit of the original Working in Movement blog based on the Radio Userland software. Time to move on.

There's been a lot of glittery stuff about how brain imaging reveals where stuff happens in the human nervous system. Searching for the person in the brain makes the point that the brain has become a pop star of sorts with all this stuff about what's going on where in the brain. But if I understand what this author is getting at, sure, they'll locate the area of the brain where these activities show up during a brain scan, but that won't mean that imaging is a tool to understand people. That's because the images don't see the complete series of complex interactions in the brain associated with this activity. Maybe it will someday.

In the meantime, though, we can be misled by the images into thinking we're really on to something here. But even some in the neuroscience field are wise to the shortcomings.

"Any new method in neuroscience is powerful in terms of evolution of the field only insofar as it tells us that something we thought we knew is wrong," said Dr. J. Anthony Movshon, director of New York University's Center for Neural Science. So far, he said, brain imaging has not done that.

The technology, he said, though now central to brain science, "is in one sense disappointing, in that so far it has told us nothing more than what a neurologist of the 19th century could have told you about brain functions and where they're localized."

And others see risk in investing in the glitter over the substance.

"The risk is that seeing the neural activity allows people to take away or excuse responsibility for a behavior — to take away the individual person," said Dr. (Lucy)Brown of the Einstein School of Medicine in New York.

I agree that it can be entertaining to read about the studies and even to imagine that we know what's going on. But I like even more the idea that the striking distinctiveness of each individual goes beyond connections of neurons or whatever else.

I was just reading about some new research when the cat jumped onto my desk and distracted me. Then the phone rang, new email arrived, and I decided to update my RSS feed reader with the latest news. It was a while before I got back to the research.

Kind of ironic because the research deals with how aging effects how easily we get distracted. Why the Aging Mind is Driven to Distraction describes the study done at the University of Toronto and the Rotman Research Institute, and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The researchers put forth the idea that aging, starting at about 40, interrupts a balance between two brain regions dealing with attention span.

"It's known that older adults are more easily distracted. We think we've found a mechanism in the brain to explain this," (lead researcher Cheryl L.) Grady said. "The functional changes are detectable by middle age."

Maybe so. But what about the role of learning and environment in all this? Even Grady concedes that learning might have something to do with it.

Grady, however, suggested that people in their 20s today — their brains molded by instant messaging and all of the other high-technology of the short attention span — may be better able to manage unwarranted interruptions when they reach old age.

"If you are a 20-year-old today," Grady said, "you may find it easier to deal with distraction when you are 60 because you have had so much practice."

I noted a couple of things here. Since the study used brain imaging to discover what was going on, it might not be revealing the whole picture. See Searching for the Person in the Brain. And the idea that culture is presenting many more things to keep track of in less time is nicely dealt with in the Steven Johnson book Everything Bad is Good for You.

Now where was I?

Lucy was in well into her 80's when I noticed that her walking balance wasn't what it used to be -- in most situations. The one exception was while grocery shopping. By leaning on a rolling grocery cart, she was hard to keep up with. The cart offered her stability that restored (and even improved) her mobility. That's when I got her one of those fancy rolling walkers, the kind with hand brakes like those on racing bicycles.

Fancy walkers might not be the only solution for folks with compromised balance and stability while walking. A research team at the University of Houston is investigating an unlikely alternative that they believe might be the answer to deteriorating balance for the elderly.

Biomechanics professor Max Kurz and his team looked to the animal kingdom for clues to the elderly balance problems caused by deteriorating nervous systems. They came up with, are you ready for this, penguins. Kurz and company observed penguins walking on a runway and hypothesized the side-to-side motion of waddling might help balance.

I think that it means that waddling possibly may be a mechanism to introduce stability and possibly we'll be able to introduce this to humans is wha"t we're hoping," he said.

They're starting with college students, teaching them to waddle like penguins. They hope to learn if this sort of training might help those with mobility problems keep their stability. A researcher at another medical center finds the approach interesting and "perhaps could help prevent her patients from falling."

And maybe save on grocery carts.