Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience – Page 1,069

This is why the language you speak can change how you perceive time

Professor Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

The finding, published in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: General’, reports the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in people who speak two languages.

Bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously — a phenomenon called code-switching.

Humans Could Soon Become Immortal, But The Cost May Be Horrifying. Would You Do It?

So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?

“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”

Taken from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, this sentence perfectly sums up the complexity and ambiguity of the human mind and the brain. Despite enormous advances, our ignorance on what lies within our cranium remains vast and sometimes unyielding. Those drops, and their relation to the bucket, are profoundly enigmatic.

We understand how different parts of the brain communicate and often what they specialize in, but what exactly is a “thought” made of? Where, amongst the 86 billion neurons in our brain, do they come from, and where do they go? What, scientifically speaking, is consciousness – is it a single entity or the sum of trillions of permutations? Is it the addition or average of all those firing neurons?

Researchers discover off-switch to inflammation machine at the root of our chronic diseases

Summary: Researchers discover what may be the key to stopping uncontrolled inflammation and the damage it causes in a multitude of chronic diseases. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A discovery by researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) could be the key to stopping the damage caused by uncontrolled inflammation in a range of chronic diseases including Alzheimer’s and liver disease.

Queensland scientists have uncovered how an inflammation process automatically switches off in healthy cells, and are now investigating ways to stop it when it runs amok. The finding may lead to a way to turn off chronic low-grade inflammation without interfering with the body’s natural defenses against infection.

Gene therapy researchers find viral barcode to cross the blood-brain barrier

This image shows AAV therapy affecting pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus. Credit: Blake Albright, Asokan Lab Gene therapies promise to revolutionize the treatment of many diseases, including neurological diseases such as ALS. But the small viruses that deliver therapeutic genes can have adverse side effects at high doses. UNC School of Medicine researchers have now found a structure on these viruses that makes them better at crossing from the bloodstream into the brain – a key factor for administering gene therapies at lower doses for treating brain and spinal disorders. This structural…

Space exploration should be an initiative of nations, not just some rich guy

Maybe it’s because Robert Lepage is touring The Far Side of the Moon to the Adelaide Festival. Or that a new Star Trek is on TV. Or maybe it’s because I feel like the only person alive who really – really – liked Luc Besson’s Valerian, but space, fantasies of the final frontier, and the real voyages that human beings may yet dare to make into it are very much on my mind. This week saw a number of news items concerning our tentative outreach to the stars that, for all their frustrating revelations, might yet prick the aspiration for space missions back into the popular policy consciousness…

It’s transhuman life, but not as we know it

#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.

The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.

It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.

Dublin writer Mark O’Connell spent three years travelling the globe, meeting people who believe that they can actually achieve this by digitising their brains and transcending human flesh to become de facto cyborgs, impervious to…

‘Altered Carbon’ and TV’s New Wave of Transhumanism

But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.

Nobody wants these dumb meat-sack bodies anymore. Now TV is asking if what replaces them will be any better.

/* */