March Tech & Toast: Reading Your Mind: How to Decode the Brain Mid-Thought
Venue: The Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center, Blacksburg
Directions: Google Map Link
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013
Time: 7:15 - 9:00 AM
Event Types: Food, Speaking Engagements, Business Related
Cost:
RBTC members: $20.00 Non-members: $39.00

Registrations paid at the door are $39.00 regardless of membership status.

Description:
The Roanoke - Blacksburg Technology Council (RBTC) hosts their March Tech and Toast entitled "Reading Your Mind: How to Decode the Brain Mid-Thought". The talk will feature speaker Stephen LaConte, PhD. The attendance cost also includes breakfast.

Ever wondered what it might be like to watch the activity of your own brain while you had the compulsion to eat a fattening dessert, thought about dancing or catching a football, or simply felt elated or depressed? How might such a technology be used to help people who have had a brain injury or a stroke, or have cerebral palsy, or struggle with an addiction?

Dr. Stephen LaConte believes that if you could decode what the brain is sensing, doing, or thinking as you scanned it using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), then you would have a powerful tool for adapting fMRI experiments in flight. Dr. LaConte has pioneered a real-time approach to fMRI that he has dubbed temporally adaptive brain state, or TABS. With this approach, he uses fMRI data not just to map the brain, but also to decode what the brain is doing mid-thought. This real-time fMRI approach has potential applications for treating neurological and psychiatric disorders. Dr. LaConte believes, for instance, that if the brain can receive input about itself in real time, it may be able to harness its own plasticity to repair itself.

Dr. LaConte earned his doctorate in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota and went on to join the research faculty in the Georgia Tech/Emory University Department of Biomedical Engineering, working in the Biomedical Imaging Technology Center. Before joining the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, he served as an assistant professor in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine.

For more information, call: 540-443-9232 or visit: http://www.thetechnologycouncil.com/Toast

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