Lifeboat Foundation

Keynote lecture at Neuroinformatics 2016 in Reading, United Kingdom.
TRACK I — NORMAL DEVELOPMENT / COGNITION
Talk title: Typical and atypical development of large-scale brain networks.
Speaker: Vinod Menon, Stanford School of Medicine, USA

About INCF
The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) is an international non-profit organization devoted to advancing the field of neuroinformatics and global collaborative brain research. Learn more about INCF: www.incf.org

Nervous systems are complex networks, comprised of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. These connections are subject to specific wiring rules that are thought to result from competitive selection pressures to minimise wiring costs and promote complex, adaptive function. While most connections in the brain are short-range, a smaller subset of metabolically costly projections extend over long distances to connect disparate anatomical areas. These long-range connections support integrated brain function and are concentrated between the most highly connected network elements; the hubs of the brain. Hub connectivity thus plays a vital role in determining how a given nervous system negotiates the trade-off between cost and value, and natural.
selection may favour connections that provide high functional benefit for low cost.

Consistent with this view, Professor Alex Fornito will present evidence.
that hub connectivity is under strong genetic control. He will show that the strength of connectivity between hubs in the human brain is more heritable than connectivity between other nodes, and that the genetic variants influencing hub connectivity overlaps with those implicated in mental illness and intelligence. He will also discuss the progress and challenges of developing generative models that evaluate the role of different cost-value trade-offs in driving complex brain topology.

Continue reading “Brain network hubs: maps, molecules, and models” »

In a bid to combat the ongoing homelessness crisis, Los Angeles County is using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and support individuals at the highest risk of becoming homeless.

This pioneering pilot program analyzes data from seven county agencies, including medical visits, mental health care, substance abuse diagnoses, arrests, and public benefit sign-ups, to identify those most vulnerable to homelessness.

Dedicated case managers then reach out to these individuals, offering comprehensive support for four to six months, including access to $4,000 to $6,000 in aid to cover essential expenses like rent, utilities, and groceries. This assistance is designed to stabilize not only their housing but also their overall well-being.

It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”

We do this on the personal level — out of such selective memory and by such exquisite exclusion, we compose the narrative that is the psychological pillar of our identity. We do it on the cultural level — what we call history is a collective selective memory that excludes far more of the past’s realities than it includes. Borges captured this with his characteristic poetic-philosophical precision when he observed that “we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” To be aware of memory’s chimera is to recognize the slippery, shape-shifting nature of even those truths we think we are grasping most firmly.

Continue reading “How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain” »

https://www.hdiac.org/podcast/neuroweapons-part-2/

The second installment of this two-part podcast continues the conversation with Dr. Giordano on the implications of weaponizing brain science. In an article he wrote for HDIAC in 2016 titled ‘Battlescape Brain’, Dr. Giordano hinted at the possibility of a neuroweapons arms race that could follow from international surveillance. Dr. Giordano provides an updated look at these concerns in the context of today’s environment. He concludes by describing ethical frameworks that could regulate future policies for biotechnology as the world moves forward in this dynamic area.

Continue reading “Weaponizing Brain Science: Neuroweapons — Part 2 of 2” »

https://www.hdiac.org/podcast/neuroweapons-part-1/

In part one of this two-part podcast, HDIAC analyst Mara Kiernan interviews Dr. James Giordano, a Professor in the department of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center. The discussion begins with Dr. Giordano defining neuroweapons and explaining their applied technologies. He provides insight into the manner in which international weapons conventions govern the use neuroweapons and discusses the threats presented by neuroweapons in today’s environment. Dr. Giordano goes on to review the need for continuous monitoring, including his views regarding challenges and potential solutions for effectively understanding global developments in neuroweapon technologies.

Continue reading “HDIAC Podcast — Weaponizing Brain Science: Neuroweapons — Part 1 of 2” »

What is the mechanism that allows our brains to incorporate new information about the world, and form memories? New work by a team of neuroscientists led by Dr Tomás Ryan from Trinity College Dublin shows that learning occurs through the continuous formation of new connectivity patterns between specific engram cells in different regions of the brain.

Whether on purpose, incidentally, or simply by accident, we are constantly learning and so our brains are constantly changing. When we navigate the world, interact with each other, or consume media content, our brain is grasping information, creating new memories.

The next time we walk down the street, meet our friends, or come across something that reminds us of the last podcast we listened to, we will quickly re-engage that memory information somewhere in our brain. But how do these experiences modify our neurons to allow us to form these new memories?

The Four Realms of Existence by Joseph LeDoux and Consciousness by John Parrington tell us a lot about human cognition, brain structure and evolution – but most of all they demonstrate how far this most tricky of quests still has to go.

By Susan Blackmore

This paper characterizes two distinct philosophies underlying previous work on how Bayesian computations are linked to neural data, highlighting how different theories may be motivated by different tacit assumptions and thereby explain different data.