"Atomic Antelope’s Chris Stevens, who created the interactive book Alice for iPad, hopes neuroscience research can find non-violent triggers to mimic the rush of pleasure gamers feel when firing guns during play. He's even calling on publishers to invest millions of dollars in cutting-edge magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to better understand the impact of games on our brains. Stevens believes that by measuring physiological responses during play, developers can create compelling – and peaceful - experiences..."

"A group of American researchers from MIT, Indiana University, and Tufts University, led by Erin Treacy Solovey, have developed Brainput — pronounced brain-put, not bra-input — a system that can detect when your brain is trying to multitask, and offload some of that workload to a computer. The idea of using computers to do our grunt work isn’t exactly new — without them, the internet wouldn’t exist, manufacturing would be a very different beast, and we’d all have to get a lot better at mental arithmetic.

"A recent project here at the Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris (LCMCP) wants to make high-performance scientific computing cheaper by finding new ways to squeeze performance from consumer-grade "gamer" hardware. The idea is nothing less than building the equivalent of a $400,000 custom high performance computing setup for only $40,000.

"It has become a part of the everyday vernacular to say, "Oh, just Google it," in order to find information not readily known. Because Google has seemingly become a part of life, says a new study that indicates the search engine is altering our brains."

Millions of people who have been prodding away at their Nintendo DS portable consoles, smug in the knowledge that they are giving their brains a proper work-out, might have to rethink how they are going to stop the contents of their skulls turning into mush.

We've found lots of technically challenging ways to monitor brain activity, but scientists may have come up with an easier one. A paper published in Nature last week describes a new method for placing electrodes onto soft, curvilinear biological surfaces: embed them them on a flexible, silk-based substrate that can be resorbed into tissue.

A recent workshop on the BCI X PRIZE – sponsored by Singularity University and held on the campus of MIT – brought together Peter Diamandis (Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation), Ray Kurzweil, John Donoghue (Founder of Cyberkinetics), Dr. Gerwin Schalk (holds a brain computer interface patent), and Ed Boyden (MIT Synthetic Neurobiology Group). Diamandis’ X PRIZE foundation is just starting to conduct interviews with experts, governments, and potential competitors. The foundation must court donors to make the $10 million+ prize a reality.