Barbosa, Stein et al. show that rather than operating independently, PFC persistent activity and ‘activity-silent’ mechanisms interact dynamically to produce serial effects in working memory, consistent with attractor models with synaptic plasticity.
Lunar igneous activities including intrusive and extrusive magmatism, and their products contain significant information about the lunar interior and its thermal state. Their distribution is asymmetrical on the nearside and farside, reflecting the global lunar dichotomy. In addition to previously returned lunar samples all from nearside (Apollo, Luna, and Chang’e-5), samples from the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin on the farside have long been thought to hold the key to rebalancing the asymmetrical understandings of the Moon and disclosing the lunar dichotomy conundrum.
Earlier this year, the Chang’e-6 mission of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, successfully launched on May 3, landed on the lunar surface on June 2, and returned to the Earth on June 25 carrying a total of 1935.3g of lunar soils. It is the world’s first lunar farside sample-return mission, which landed in the south of the Apollo basin within the SPA basin on the farside. These precious samples would open a window to solve the long-standing question of lunar dichotomy, even reshape human’s knowledge of our closest neighbour. However, compared with the well-known mare volcanism surrounding the Chang’e-6 landing site, the intrusive magmatic activities have a much more obscure presence and origin, impeding future sample analyses when they are available for application.
In a recent research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Dr Yuqi QIAN, Professor Joseph MICHALSKI and Professor Guochun ZHAO from the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and their domestic and international collaborators have comprehensively studied the intrusive magmatism of the Chang’e-6 landing site and its surroundings based on remote sensing data. The study revealed their extensive distributions and obscure nature with significant implications for the petrogenesis of lunar plutonic rocks and the Chang’e-6 mission, which will facilitate scientists’ further study of lunar farside.
Our ability to understand the mind and its relation to the body is highly dependent on the way we define consciousness and the lens through which we study it. We argue that looking at conscious experience from an information-theory perspective can help obtain a unified and parsimonious account of the mind. Today’s dominant models consider consciousness to be a specialized function of the brain characterized by a discrete neural event. Against this background, we consider subjective experience through information theory, presenting consciousness as the propagation of information from the past to the future. We examine through this perspective major characteristics of consciousness. We demonstrate that without any additional assumptions, temporal continuity in perception can explain the emergence of volition, subjectivity, higher order thoughts, and body boundaries. Finally, we discuss the broader implications for the mind-body question and the appeal of embodied cognition.
Keywords: body boundaries; consciousness; information theory; neural correlates of consciousness (NCC); perception; self; volition.
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