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Before undergoing surgeries and other invasive medical procedures, patients typically undergo anesthesia. Anesthesia consists in giving patients a class of drugs (i.e., anesthetics) that cause them to lose feeling in specific areas of the body (i.e., local anesthesia) or fully lose awareness during a procedure (i.e., general anesthesia). These anesthetics can be administered to patients via injection, inhalation, skin-numbing lotions, and other means.

In the past, doctors and medical researchers viewed general anesthesia as a passive process that could not be influenced or interrupted once anesthetic drugs were administered. More recently, however, studies showed that it is in fact an active brain process that can be experimentally controlled and acted on.

A research team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning brain states while under general anesthesia and those associated with the subsequent re-emergence of awareness. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlight possible strategies that could help anesthesiologists to extend and deepen or shorten periods of anesthesia.

Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have analyzed RNA editing in postmortem brains of four schizophrenia cohorts and uncovered a significant and reproducible trend of hypo-editing in patients of European descent.

The paper “Widespread RNA hypo-editing in schizophrenia and its relevance to mitochondrial function,” published in Science Advances, details the research team’s efforts to isolate functionally impacting RNA editing sites to understand how dysregulated editing contributes to various disorders.

In the data analysis, researchers identified 26,841 unique differential editing sites. They observed a significant trend of lower than expected amounts of RNA editing in the schizophrenia groups, which was reproduced in three of the four cohorts of European individuals.

A new study has shown how the brain’s cognitive maps are used and updated for reasoning, allowing us to make decisions in unfamiliar situations.

Large brains, long life spans and elaborate problem-solving in crows makes them surprisingly similar to humans.

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This paper presents a relevant contribution towards an effective and convenient “Science 2.0” universal computational framework to achieve deeper cognitive intelligence at your fingertips and beyond. Computational information conservation theory CICT can help us to develop competitive applications and even advanced quantum cognitive computational application and systems towards deep computational cognitive intelligence. CICT new awareness of a discrete HG hyperbolic geometry subspace reciprocal space, RS of coded heterogeneous hyperbolic structures, underlying the familiar Q Euclidean direct space, DS system surface representation can open the way to holographic information geometry HIG to recover lost coherence information in system description and to develop advanced quantum cognitive systems. This paper is a relevant contribution towards an effective and convenient “Science 2.0” unive.

Upon analysis, researchers found the phototherapy treatments significantly improved MMSE scores in participants with dementia.

The second focus of the study was to see how phototherapy interventions affected the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSDs) — such as depression and agitation — and sleep. The researchers stated there were no significant differences in BPSDs and sleep between the phototherapy and control groups.

As long as people have been alive, they’ve wanted to stay alive. But unlike finding the fountain of youth or becoming a vampire, uploading your brain to a computer or the cloud might actually be possible. Theoretically, we already know how to do it, and Elon Musk is even trying a brain implant with Neuralink. But technically, we have a long way to go. We explain the main technological advancements that we’ll need to make whole brain emulation a reality.

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Until now, it was unclear as to whether drugs that clear amyloid, which accumulate in the brain during aging and accompany diseases such as Alzheimer’s, have any influence over cognitive decline.

Previous studies have aimed to find this out, but results have been inconclusive due to study designs, hard-to-interpret data, and other issues that muddy the waters. March 10-14th saw the 15th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases being held (virtually of course), where Dr. Mark Mintun of Eli Lilly presented data that, at least somewhat, affirmatively answers the question [1].