A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology has not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive activity by a group of neurons that researchers working with animals to perform the same task had not noticed in their data before, reports a team of scientists at Dartmouth College, MIT, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Getting older means losing things. Some are fine, like any f**ks you have left to give or your tolerance for cheap tequila. Others, like the ability to follow a conversation in a loud room, hit harder.
But scientists now think there’s a way to fight back. And it might start at a piano bench.
Researchers publishing in PLOS Biology found that older adults who have played music for decades have brains that function more like those of someone half their age, at least when it comes to understanding speech in loud environments. In brain scans, they showed cleaner, more focused activity while listening to spoken syllables buried in background noise. Their brains weren’t scrambling. They already knew what to do.
Professor John Donoghue explains why quantum physics and gravity actually work perfectly together. He tackles quadratic gravity, effective field theory, and random dynamics, arguing that grand unification and naturalness aren’t required for a theory of everything.
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