An in-depth review of David Chalmers’s 2010 paper on the singularity, recursive intelligence, machine consciousness, mind uploading, and personal identity.
Category: neuroscience – Page 2
Dreams drain energy: The REM sleep paradox
The brain demands a lot of energy compared with other organs. However, it can also make do when energy supplies are scarce, flexibly processing information using what is available. How the brain resourcefully allocates this limited energy across internal states remains a key question in neuroscience.
Sleep provides a useful window into answering this question. Although sleep is associated with rest, the brain remains highly active. This is especially true during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage closely linked to dreaming and memory processing. REM sleep is sometimes called “paradoxical sleep” because the body is largely still while the brain shows wake-like activity. Researchers at Tohoku University have now uncovered another paradox within REM sleep: While energy supply to the dreaming brain appears to rise, the energy molecule used directly by neurons falls. The findings are published in Communications Biology.
“Ever felt exhausted after a vivid dream?” asks Professor Ko Matsui of Tohoku University. “Sleep may appear peaceful, but the brain is highly active—especially when dreaming. We were intrigued by this paradox and wanted to look into the scientific basis behind why dreaming is somehow tiring.”
Vaccine therapy for pediatric highgrade glioma: current landscape, challenges, and future directions NeuroOncology
Pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGG) are among the most aggressive childhood brain tumors, with limited treatment options and poor prognosis. Vaccine-based immunotherapy offers a promising strategy by leveraging tumor-specific or associated antigens to stimulate durable anti-tumor immune responses with minimal toxicity.
This review outlines the scientific rationale for vaccine therapies in pHGG, detailing key targets such as glioma-associated antigens (EphA2, IL-13Rα2, survivin), driver mutation–derived neoantigens (H3.3K27M, TP53, IDH1), and viral antigens (CMV pp65). We evaluate current vaccine platforms, including peptide vaccines, dendritic cell vaccines, mRNA-based vaccines, and neoantigen-personalized approaches, highlighting early-phase clinical trial results that demonstrate safety and immunogenicity. Despite encouraging preliminary data, several challenges hinder clinical translation, including the distinct immune environment in the central nervous system, intratumoral heterogeneity, low mutational burden, immunosuppressive microenvironments, steroid use, and logistical hurdles in vaccine production and trial design. Future research must address these barriers through optimized antigen selection, combinatorial therapies, novel delivery systems, and pediatric-specific immune profiling.
With continued multidisciplinary collaboration, vaccine therapies may emerge as a meaningful addition to the therapeutic arsenal for children with pHGG.
Gene therapy reverses complete congenital night blindness in mice, improving vision
A new preclinical study suggests that gene augmentation therapy may restore sight in a severe form of inherited night blindness. The work, reported in Gene Therapy, targets complete congenital stationary night blindness (cCSNB), a disorder in which the retinal circuitry fails to generate reliable visual responses from birth. In mouse models, treatment improved both retinal function and visual performance, offering a promising blueprint for future human therapies.
The researchers focused on augmenting gene activity to compensate for the underlying molecular defect driving defective photoreceptor signaling. Rather than attempting to edit the genome directly, the approach delivers functional genetic instructions to retinal cells, aiming to re-establish healthier visual transduction. This strategy is designed for conditions where disease-causing pathways can be partially rescued by restoring protein expression levels.
Using viral delivery, the team administered a therapeutic vector into the eyes of affected mice. After treatment, they monitored retinal function with electrophysiological assays that quantify how well retinal neurons respond to light. The results showed a measurable shift toward more normal response patterns, indicating that the treated retinas regained function rather than merely delaying degeneration.
Brain waves once seen as noise could help build a biological model of reality
Your brain has something surprising in common with the ocean: waves. Electrical activity washes over the brain’s surface, creating what are called traveling brain waves, or neural traveling waves. These waves cause real differences in your behavior and attention and—again, like ocean waves—can have variable causes, from intrinsic activity to environmental inputs.
A new review article by Salk Institute neuroscientists synthesizes physiological and computational information about these neural traveling waves and draws a new conclusion: Neural traveling waves are a computational engine in the visual cortex. These waves allow the visual cortex (and likely other areas of the brain) to build representations of the external world, enabling our capacity to predict, reconstruct and perceive the world around us.
The piece was published in Neuron on July 21, 2026.
