Lifeboat Foundation

O,.o.

Studying transitions in and out of the altered state of consciousness caused by intravenous (IV) N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT — a fast-acting tryptamine psychedelic) offers a safe and powerful means of advancing knowledge on the neurobiology of conscious states. Here we sought to investigate the effects of IV DMT on the power spectrum and signal diversity of human brain activity (6 female, 7 male) recorded via multivariate EEG, and plot relationships between subjective experience, brain activity and drug plasma concentrations across time. Compared with placebo, DMT markedly reduced oscillatory power in the alpha and beta bands and robustly increased spontaneous signal diversity. Time-referenced and neurophenomenological analyses revealed close relationships between changes in various aspects of subjective experience and changes in brain activity.

A weird and brilliantly effective optical illusion that has gone viral on the internet tricks your brain into seeing a color image … but if you look closely you will notice that the photo you are looking at is only black and white.

The viral image was created by artist and developer Øyvind Kolås who carefully overlaid red, orange, yellow, blue, and green grid lines over black and white images.

“An over-saturated coloured grid overlaid on a grayscale image causes the grayscale cells to be perceived as having colour,” Kolås explains on his Patreon page.

Continue reading “This Photo Is Black And White. It Uses Color Grid Lines to Trick Your Brain” »

The key is an innovation that’s being called ‘light beads microscopy’. It improves on current two-photon microscopy, using lasers to trigger introduced fluorescence in living cells. As the cells are lit up, scientists can see how they’re moving and interacting.

With light beads microscopy, scientists can get the speed, scale, and resolution required to map a mouse brain in detail as its neural activity changes. The near-simultaneous tracking can last for as long as the light beads are able to stay illuminated.

Discoveries by Deisseroth and his two co-recipients regarding microbial light-activated molecules led to his development of a way to manipulate selected neurons in living animals to observe changes in their behavior.

A deepening understanding of the brain has created unprecedented opportunities to alleviate the challenges posed by disability. Scientists and engineers are taking design cues from biology itself to create revolutionary technologies that restore the function of bodies affected by injury, aging, or disease — from prosthetic limbs that effortlessly navigate tricky terrain to digital nervous systems that move the body after a spinal cord injury.

With the establishment of the new K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, MIT is pushing forward the development and deployment of enabling technologies that communicate directly with the nervous system to mitigate a broad range of disabilities. The center’s scientists, clinicians, and engineers will work together to create, test, and disseminate bionic technologies that integrate with both the body and mind.

Cardiovascular fat deposition, found to be higher in postmenopausal women compared with premenopausal women, is a novel risk factor for cardiovascular disease. It is also believed to affect cognitive function through neuropathological pathways by changing the secretion of inflammatory cytokines and adipokines. The quality of cardiovascular fat is characterized by its radiodensity.

Summary: Greater radiodensity of perivascular adipose tissue in women during midlife was associated with decreased working memory performance later in life.

Source: NAMS

Continue reading “The Quality, Not Quantity, of Cardiovascular Fat Can Interfere With Memory Later in Life” »

Deep brain implants are paving the way for solutions to neurologic conditions and potentially, toward “superhuman cognition.” However, there are serious ethical implications associated with this emerging innovation.

I believe if superintelligence can be digitized into computer code then essentially a microchip could send electrical impulses to one’s brain noninvasive like the microchip that heals from Ohio state and then superintelligence could be attained and the biological wetware could be easily acquire the biological singularity. Much like the moto that Apple has all things digital a new superintelligence attribute could uploaded and the human could evolve or gene edit from a smartphone also the impulse could be non invasive like low level electrical impulse sending data to the brain using existing hardware. We could be as advanced as any exterrestial civilization in a couple keystrokes using existing hardware.

Popular expectations for the future are helplessly colored by present trends. The assumption is always that whatever’s going on now can be safely extrapolated into the future along a linear (or, per Kurzweil, logarithmic) curve. So it was that during the space race, baby boomers took for granted that we’d have fully colonized the solar system by the year 2000.

Summary: Mouse study reveals chronic stress affects neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus.

Source: Tokyo University of Science.

Depression is a serious medical condition that plagues modern society. Several theories have been proposed to explain the physiological basis of depression, of which the “neurogenic hypothesis of depression” has garnered much attention.